If you find yourself exhausted by the thought of all those 100-hour RPGs and open-world games in your backlog, you're in good company. Shawn Layden, who served for decades in executive roles at PlayStation, culminating in his tenure as chairman for SIE Worldwide Studios from 2014 through 2019, says that game development costs are skyrocketing to unsustainable levels, and part of the problem is that games have gotten very, very long.
Layden tells Eurogamer that game dev costs tend to double every generation. "The PS4 generation, which was the last I was associated with, game dev was 150m if you want to be top of the line, and that's before marketing," he explains. "So by that math, PS5 games should eventually reach $300m to $400m - and that is just outright not sustainable.
