Shawn Layden used to be the President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, staying with PlayStation for over 9 years, so he knows the industry well. Despite his experience, he thinks he would not change anything at Nintendo, given the chance.
In an interview with HipHopGamer, Layden was asked what he’d do if he were in charge at the Japanese company. Surprisingly, not much because he believes Nintendo knows what it’s doing better than even PlayStation.
He recalls that during the pandemic, many companies rushed to hire a lot of people (who are now being laid off) because players had more time to spend on games at home, and managers decided it was a good idea to “chase that number. Let’s go, go, go, throw some more gas on the fire.”
However, Nintendo wasn’t among them.
So if Layden had a lead role there, he’d “stand back and ask people there, ‘What’s the plan? Because you guys seem to have it dialed in.'” Nintendo has been in the game industry “for over hundred years” and “their moves are very intentional.” They don’t follow the market, they only respond to it: “They have plans and they move on through.”
One of their plans is to allegedly make developers create games for Switch 1 instead of the upcoming Switch 2 by not providing development kits. Perhaps they have some kind of insight here as well.
Layden is not the first PlayStation boss, albeit a former one, to look up to the company: Sony has recently made the “difficult decision” to follow in Nintendo’s footsteps and raise prices for its consoles.
Before that, Layden said that publishers have to make games more expensive due to the cost of construction: “If you’re going to spend over $200 million to build a game, your margins are super tight, unless you can expect to sell 25 million units. Unless you’re Rockstar, you should not expect to sell 25 million units.” He thinks “the exploding cost of game development” is “not sustainable.”
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