Former PlayStation boss calls exclusivity the industry's 'Achilles' heel … Helldivers 2 has shown that'

Gaming IndustryHelldivers 2Former PlayStation boss calls exclusivity the industry’s ‘Achilles’ heel … Helldivers 2 has shown that’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Arrowhead Studios)

Two Helldivers share a tender moment in Helldivers 2, while Automatons ravage the landscape behind them with explosions.

Granted, there’s plenty of reasons as to why a dev team would want tooptimise something for a specific loadout—the PC’s breadth of potential compatibility issues are a complete nightmare, especially as games get bigger in scope.

PlayStation has been a particular pain point over the past few years, with some genuinely excellent games like Final Fantasy 7 Remake, 2018’s God of War, and Insomniac’s Spider-Man taking their sweet time to mosey on over to Steam. Trends have continued with Rebirth, God of War: Ragnarök, and Spider-Man 2 respectively.

But worry not, fair keyboard warrior—it seems like the tide is largely turning according to bothPlayStation’s current president, and now its former one too. That’s according to an interview with ex-head honcho Shawn Layden, courtesy ofGamesBeat.

“When your costs for a game exceed $200 million,” Layden says, “Exclusivity is your Achilles' heel. It reduces your addressable market. Particularly when you’re in the world of live service gaming or free-to-play. Another platform is just another way of opening the funnel, getting more people in.”

(Image credit: Santa Monica Studio)

An image of Kratos from God of War Ragnarok sat in a frigid cave, while his son enters stage left with a deer.

The recent wave of live service games has followed a very similar pattern to the wave of MMORPGs in 2010-2020. As I pointed outlast year, the problem is still very much the same: A big thing becomes popular, companies want to make their own version of the big thing, spend a bunch of money to do so, then watch it collapse under its own weight. The gaming ecosystem can only support a few of these giants before the whole thing buckles and breaks.

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As for single-player titles, Layden says there’s grounds to benefit there too: “For single-player games it’s not the same exigency. But if you’re spending $250 million, you want to be able to sell it to as many people as possible, even if it’s just 10% more.” He notes that while the console user base has increased its raw spending over time, “I look at that and see that we’re just taking more money from the same people.”

This is mostly just further evidence to stack onto the pile that—no,PC gaming isn’t dead. It’s also cause to cross my fingers even harder that we’ll eventually see the end of these year-long waits—though whether we’ll see more day-one releases like Helldivers 2 is another question entirely. The prestige of “Only on PlayStation” games is still a huge part of the company’s strategy, so we could just be looking at a shorter window, rather than a closed one.

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