Former PlayStation boss: ‘Exclusivity will always be important’

Former CEO of SIE America and chairman of Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden has reiterated the importance of exclusivity during a recent podcast appearance.

Speaking on the What’s Up PlayStation podcast, the former Sony executive spoke on the importance of first-party games and their function in the market.

“Exclusivity will always be important, it helps focus and highlight the features of your platform. What can you do here technically that you can’t do someplace else.

“But, as your platform becomes established as the market recognizes where you sit in that pantheon of gaming options, I think the necessity of exclusivity becomes a little bit less.”

In a recently published interview with Gamesbeat, the former PlayStation frontman described the ballooning budgets of first-party games as their “Achilles’ heel.”

“When your costs for a game exceed $200 million, exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel,” Layden told Gamesbeat. “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.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Layden also spoke to PlayStation’s exclusivity philosophy in its early years and how its focus on being an open platform for third parties differentiated it from Sega and Nintendo.

“PlayStation was never a first-party-driven platform. You look at Nintendo & Sega in the 90s, their first-party output was the lion’s share of the software market. You could publish on N64 but the top 10 games were always going to be Nintendo games on there.

“PlayStation always began with a third-party focus of the platform business.

“First-party isn’t there to steal market share from Electronic Arts or Square, first party is there to grow the pie bigger.”