One of the most prominent and well-known former PlayStation executives is Shawn Layden, and it is thanks to him that Sony now owns Insomniac Games. He left the company in 2019, but has remained in the gaming world and is often an interesting and outspoken voice in the industry.
Now he has an interesting take again, and believes that we are approaching the point where consoles are becoming irrelevant. We’ve got at most one, or a maximum of two generations left before they’ve served their purpose, he says in a very interesting interview with Eurogamer:
“I think we’re at a point where the console becomes irrelevant in the next… if not the next generation then the next next generation definitely.”
The reason is that Layden doesn’t think the consoles are getting any further. They are now equivalent in terms of performance and the innovations consist of things that often require an extremely good TV to even benefit from. The steps today are very small and he says that we’re “not going to see another PS1 to PS2 jump in performance – we have sort of maxed out there”.
Layden goes on to explain that today there is no difference between the consoles, which are even made from the same components from the same company. They are simply not evolving anymore, he explains:
“We’re at a point now where the innovation curve on the hardware is starting to plateau, or top out. At the same time, the commoditization of the silicon means that when you open up an Xbox or PlayStation, it’s really pretty much the same chipset. It’s all built by AMD. Each company has its own OS and proprietary secret sauce, but in essence [it’s the same]. I think we’re pretty much close to [the] final spec for what a console could be.”
What do you think, is Layden on to something? Will it continue to be important to release hardware that can only play certain companies’ titles, even though they are basically just the same with new components that add little more than higher resolution and higher frames-per-second?