Shawn Layden, former president of Sony PlayStation: "layman giants" such as Apple are a big threat to the game industry.

CTOnews.com, September 5 (Xinhua)-- Shawn Layden, a former Sony PlayStation executive, recently said that large technology companies that are not unique to the gaming industry are one of the biggest threats to the current business. Layden, who previously served as president of Sony's global studio, left in 2019.

Speaking at the GamesIndustry.biz investment summit, Layden called companies such as Google, Netflix, Amazon and Apple "barbarians at the door".

"now, we see all the big players saying,'Oh, games? does it generate billions of dollars a year? I want a piece of it," he says. "so Google, Netflix, Apple and Amazon all want a piece of the pie and try to upend our industry."

"I hope games will be the first industry to be upended by themselves, and we don't need Google or Amazon to turn things around. we should be smart enough to see these changes coming and prepare for this possibility."

CTOnews.com learned from the summit report that Layden also talked about what happened when Sony first entered the game market: "We know that PlayStation can't provide most of the first-party content itself like Sega and Nintendo, so we have to be a third-party platform, so we tried to win the content of Namenggong, Square, EA, Activision Blizzard and other game publishers."

In Layden's view, another big threat to the current state of the game is industry consolidation, which he calls "possible enemies of creativity" and the rising cost of game development, which he calls an "existential threat". In 2020, Layden called the overall development of AAA games "unsustainable" and suggested that the duration and pricing of games might have to be adjusted to cope with the ballooning budget.