The former Playstation chief predicts that developing PS5 games will be costly.

$200 million for the headlines. “It will lead to alignment.”

Sean Layden previously worked as a lead manager in various positions in the PlayStation hierarchy, before resigning in October last year. in a Interview with Bloomberg He now says the cost of game development is rising — even going so far as to say the cost doubles for each generation of game consoles.

Leiden told Bloomberg that during his tenure, producing a game for Playstation 4 cost an average of $100 million (roughly 900 million Swedish kronor), and that development costs for PS5 games would eventually rise to $200 million. This, in turn, will cause the companies to play safe cards, which reduces the risk, when it comes to AAA games. A sequel to the bestseller was mentioned. (Of course, the biggest titles cost a lot. For example, Red Dead Redemption 2 cost up to $540 million.)

“What happens there is that you end up with three to four silos of games or game types that are still out there, and the variety is cut back.”

Of course, there is a lot in it: just look at the Playstation lineup in the AAA slot – just a sequel. But at the same time, it doesn’t feel like a completely new exploration, and we hope that new game concepts always emerge organically, from below.

On Thursday, Playstation will run a stream where it intends to show material from PS5 games that will be released during 2021-2022, from larger and smaller developers. See you there and then!