Former Sony boss says the industry's obsession with the 'mirage' of live service games is futile: 'The highway is littered with people wanting to take on Fortnite'

One thing I'm at least reasonably confident that we at the good ship PC Gamer share with you lot is the fact we're all a little sick of live service games. As fellow PCG writer Ted Litchfield put it in the article I just linked, "Surely we've seen enough to know that trying to retrofit a singleplayer studio into a 'live service machine go brrr' moneymaker is not a smart bet."

Joining the crowd of nodding heads on this particular matter is Shawn Layden, a former Sony exec who left the company in 2019, who was part of a multi-developer interview with The Ringer's Lewis Gordon.

"It's like a mirage on the top of a sand dune," Layden says. "You pursue it. You can't quite get there. Or if you do get there, what you brought to the party no one wants to play anyway."

As the article notes, Layden's tenure oversaw a trio of Sony's singleplayer knockouts, and part of why he left the company was due to their live-service pivot, which he quips were "not my skillset."

Layden oversaw God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Ghost of Tsushima. Not a terrible track record if you're arguing that singleplayer games are more reliable than hounding after that live service pot of gold, I'd say. As a matter of fact, Layden says that while he, too, saw the mirage, he knew it wasn't a good bet:

"My view at the time was, 'We're super strong on single-player. We have the best narrative in the business.' It was a case of, 'I'm doing The Last of Us—that's where we swim. I'm gonna do Spider-Man' … Fortnite is the classic example of catching lightning in a jar, you can’t plan for that. You can’t prepare for that. You can’t envision that."

He also just wasn't that interested in the idea of making one: "A live-service game to me isn’t really a game. It’s a repetitive action engagement device."

Ultimately, Layden argues that "The highway is littered with people wanting to take on Fortnite, with people trying to do Overwatch with different skins … If you’re trying to go into that space because you have this illusion in your mind of big sacks of money coming every day for the rest of your life, for most it doesn’t happen."

I can only imagine how Layden must've felt late last year when his gut instinct was proven exactly right, and Concord, Sony's attempt at an Overwatch, existed for less than a month before Sony decided to pull the plug. And, uh, also Marathon. And then the other live service games it axed in a panicked flurry.

That's not to say all of their attempts have failed; Helldivers 2 did pretty well, and Sony published that one. But, er, Layden was the one to greenlight that, so it might just be that Sony lost its nose when he departed.

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