Video games
Former PlayStation boss warns of consequences of big acquisitions: “often it impacts creativity”
Shawn Layden is concerned about the impact of the Activision Blizzard acquisition.
Microsoft’s final acquisition of Activision Blizzard is one of the most important news stories of the year, if not the most important. The consequences of this acquisition are probably too far away for us to see. More than a few voices have spoken out against these major operations, and one of them is that of Shawn Layden, who was president of Sony Worldwide Studios from 2014 to 2019 and one of those most responsible for the success of PlayStation 4. Today he is a consultant for the Chinese giant Tencent.
“My concern around consolidation is that often it impacts creativity,” Layden begins on the LAN Parties podcast. 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,” Layden said. “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.”
“I’m just concerned about what it does to the creativity urge inside of the studios,” Layden continues. “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.”
Activision Blizzard will soon be Microsoft’s
Although the operation is not yet complete, the cession of the British CMA to Microsoft’s concessions regarding cloud gaming has finally opened the door to become a reality sooner rather than later. This means that in a few months we will be able to see the most important games of the former on Xbox Game Pass, such as Diablo IV or future installments of Call of Duty, among which, for the moment, the imminent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III will not be found.