Former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden has once again issued a warning to the games sector, this time around the trend towards consolidation.
Speaking on the Lan Parties podcast – as reported by Kotaku – the industry vet said that consolidation, such as Microsoft's recent $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, is not a good thing for the market.
“My concern around consolidation is that often it impacts creativity," Layden explains.
"For instance, it takes some kind of small, independent, wildhorse studios and brings them into a larger conglomerate and essentially time slows down the bigger you are, time slows down. I’m also concerned when studios get bought and instead of enabling a way to create their game, they maybe get absorbed into a larger enterprise that’s making a larger game, you know, how many studios are involved in making blockbuster games that will stagger the mind.”
He continued: “I’m just concerned about what it does to the creativity urge inside of the studios, and can they keep that sort of independent creativity alive or do they just get absorbed into the larger whole? Time will tell, but it’s a bit concerning. When you go from hundreds of voices to dozens of voices, you lose some voices."
