By Former PlayStation head Shawn Layden believes people are vastly inflating what generative AI will do for the gaming sector, insisting the emerging technology isn’t about to slash budgets the way certain executives are hoping.
“There’s plenty of speculation—mostly from folks outside the industry—about how AI is poised to transform games, claiming ‘it will speed up particular tasks’,” Layden remarked to gamesindustry.biz during a recent conversation.
He likens AI’s influence on games to how bookkeepers once reacted to the arrival of Excel: “To me, AI’s effect on development parallels how spreadsheets impacted certified public accountants.” Sure, “it was more efficient to run a macro instead of punching numbers on a desktop calculator,” he notes, yet those accountants “still needed sufficient expertise to judge whether the results were accurate and to understand what the figures meant afterward.”
In a loosely connected point, Layden observed that externalized production—an approach many publishers lean on to trim expenses—has steadily improved across console cycles.
“Back at the start we might as well have built the asset ourselves once you factored in the nine rounds of revisions,” he recalled, citing the disconnect between studios at home and outsourcing partners abroad. Today, “the synergy between internal teams and engineering groups in Taiwan or art houses in Malaysia is far more refined and keeps getting tighter.”
Yet he remains “skeptical” that both AI and smoother outsourcing “will truly slow the upward march of budgets.”