Concord was a hypnotically bizarre event to me, I started watching some of the Youtubers you mention out of sheer disbelief over what was happening, and a few weeks after, when it was all done, most of those Youtubers I moved on from. But there were plenty of people willing to be fair to the game, including on Youtube. Dare I say it when developers make good games; there are influencers that would fall over them themselves to recommend those games to their viewers.
Totally disagree on the Concord concept art vs. execution though. Execution there is worse in every way, and needlessly so. It looks like a bad cosplay of the concept art. Yes in both cases the character is "of girth" and obviously wearing some sort of "upcycled" thing from a landfill. But. In the first the character's pose and bearing is heroic, if not aggressive. In the latter it is slovenly. The details in the first say "I made these modifications and repairs myself, and they do Important Stuff(tm)." The latter says "I just found this crap and strapped it together. Nothing matters."
The former is bulky and sturdy, the latter is puffy and ugly. The first is worn and scuffed from use. The latter looks like damage from abuse and neglect. The palette in the first is grungy, subtly muted. The latter looks like it was salvaged from a grimy play place in an off-brand fast food chain. The differences are subtle, yes, but that little tweak in saturation and drop in contrast between elements makes a huge difference, as it often does in artwork.
I could just keep ranting here almost indefinitely. All of these things I just ranted about were unforced errors. There are no conceivable technical limitations here.
These details matter. Character designs matter, because you're asking players to commit to endless hours of inhabiting those characters, projecting themselves onto them, letting the characters project themselves onto the player.
Nobody wants to play a slovenly character who doesn't take her job seriously and obviously doesn't want to be there. Let that personality reflect itself in your mindset as you play the game and what happens? You don't take the game seriously and you don't want to be there.
The whole lineup was like that. Nobody wanted to play those characters, so nobody found out whether the gameplay was "fine".
I don't really disagree with your take on the character design - I said many of the same things when I first say this comparison. In particularly the puffiness combined with the material that looks more like sofa pleather than metal (the materials are an across-the-board problem IMO) looks silly - like someone pumped air into the costume.
That said I don't love the visible "intestines" on the older image. But, more to the point, this level of change from the original concept (which I do think is better) doesn't strike me as out of the ordinary.
I think these concepts do look better than what was shipped, but they aren't that different, and they use an art style that the game didn't try to replicate so it's a bit apples-to-oranges.
Had Concord shipped with those character designs I don't think it would have made much difference. But I do agree that compared to the concept some of the final versions almost look parodic or silly, and that's especially true of this particular character. (And Daw)
The only AAA games I've played in the last decade are:
- V Rising
- Dark Souls
- Mario Kart 8 DX
- SSBU
- XCOM 2
- No Man's Sky (although this was like... 7 years after it was released, so idunno)
And of them, I've only played MK8 and Dark Souls this calendar year. There are tons of indie, or even AA games that are incredibly good. Drill Core, Jupiter Hell, Balatro, UFO 50, Abiotic Factor, Slay the Spire, Noita, the whole Kingdom series, Pokerogue, I could go on all day, have sucked so much more time than nearly any big release.
You mention the inconsistency of blaming management, is it doing too much or too little, etc.
"Management" is the coward's road to mediocrity. Creative endeavors and new things need LEADERSHIP. Which means the leader makes the core decisions, and is accountable for success or failure, with a career affected by those results.
Your article makes it crystal-clear that this is lacking.
Bethesda is a prime example where something has fundamentally broken on a process level there. They can no longer release games on anything resembling a timely schedule. Multiple console generations have passed since the last elder scrolls game and it’s nowhere near release. Ditto fallout. They spent years and years on starfield and it was mediocre. They just don’t seem capable of releasing quality games or really games at all anymore
The gap in elder scrolls games is perfectly fine, they released three whole games between that, one of which is a GaaS.
I suspect a large amount of their woes has to do with being beholden to that engine of theirs, Creation Engine. They attempted to make a new one for Starfield too but it’s very obviously built on the bones of the original in all the worst ways.
On the writing point and footnote: Is this disconnect mostly because the kind of people who work as professional writers at game studios are themselves very in-tune to mass market genre fiction trends (ie YA) in ways the consumers aren’t?
In some sense this feels like games being infected with a broader narrowing of writing register among the goodreadsy people who read and write and self-identify with fantasy fiction the most, rather than something endogenous.
I don't have a good non-speculative answer. I assume that game writers are more in line with genre fiction trends than the gaming audience, which leans male and probably isn't composed of big readers.
The game industry doesn't employ many writers on writing-forward games, so I suspect games writing is even more susceptible to being trend-driven than other aspects of game production.
I'm hoping that the success of Expedition 33 will help make more sincere writing fashionable again. I find a lot of popular entertainment is written from the perspective of "what would these characters say in this situation, were they on an amusing TV show?" instead of "were this were really happening."
Might help on the sincerity front that gamers and critics have language for this that doesn’t as strongly evoke culture war; lots of ”whedon-speak” namedrops online last couple years!
i feel iffy about the lack of willingness to touch on culture war issues
specifically... i remember back when i was in school, everyone had mandatory community service, and i managed to get someine to sign off on "serving on wikipedia's conflict mediation team" as a community service, which was honestly a great formative experience. most conflicts were pretty small and personal.
but i got randomly assigned to mediate one conflict in particular, about the history of a specific, unusually-designed bridge's engineering, that had clearly been infected by tribalism. the participants hated each other with a passion. this felt bizarre to me at the time; why would they be so mad over what specific engineering principles kept a bridge from collapsing?
In the mediator guidelines, they told us to drill down to object level issues as quickly as possible. So I did. I asked them why this issue was controversial and what actual bridge engineers had to say about it. they responded... strangely. they acted like they expected me to not want to touch the controversial issue at all, and instead strike any mention of engineering from the article. but since i was immediately diving into the controversy, it was as if i was asking whose team I should join. and they considered this a violation of the expectation of neutrality.
and there was indeed a "neutral" editor among them, who had carefully never stated his opinions at all about how bridges refrain from collapsing, and he in particular got really mad at me and reported me to the mediation noticeboard for a failure to maintain neutrality.
i think about that event a lot. Every once in awhile I go back and check the article, to see if anybody has written about how an extremely strangely designed a bridge actually works, and the article continues to not even talk about it. which really annoys me, because the bridge looks like it ought to fall into the river pretty much immediately.
But once the issue became controversial, actually trying to figure out the truth of the matter became... gauche? taboo? idk.
When chuds like asmongold might have legitimate culture-war complaints about games, your response isn't "ugh, my tribal enemies might have a point that i have to acknowledge" but more like "ugh, someone who actually deigned to step down into the muck of tribal politics might have a point that i have to acknowledge"
My philosophy for the most part is to just talk about the underlying issue (in your case, the bridge construction) and not give much oxygen to the culture war aspects. The Battlefield trailer looked weird and I think it's fine to say that without worrying too much about which side that's scoring points for. To some degree when we tread too carefully we give outrage-peddlers the power to set the agenda.
That said. were I working on a game that was under culture war scrutiny I probably wouldn't want to acknowledge any points, even if they were valid, because that conversation not only becomes a huge pain in the ass but also you get people bothering you on social media, quoting you out of context to make you look bad, etc.
I think it's totally fair for critics or other developers to say the writing in Dragon Age isn't great - we don't have to pretend it's great to score points in a culture war battle. But expecting that actual writers of Dragon Age to admit that the writing isn't great is asking a lot. It's never easy to admit that something didn't turn out as well as you hoped but when people are looking to turn that into culture war ammo I get just not bothering with the conversation at all.
An added wrinkle is that some of the people saying "look, all culture war bullshit aside the writing isn't great" aren't actually putting the culture war bullshit aside, and in fact their main objections *are* culture-war related. I saw something similar with True Detective Season 4 - I don't think it's particularly well written but a lot of the people saying it had "bad writing" were upset that it was woman-lead, including some people who swore up and down that they *weren't* upset about that.
In particular, with the controversy over the Wikipedia article in question, it was the exact underlying issues that were culture warred
like, imagine a world in which there was a 'red' and a 'blue' position on whether we should use 1990s dual stick controls for FPSes, or 2010 controls
There's no law of the universe that says that the actual underlying issues, the issues that actually matter in objective reality, can't be exactly the issues that get politicized
in fact... i think it's sort of more likely than not? people care about things that matter, therefore things that matter get politicized
And if we decide that we're only ever going to talk about things that are not politicized, it might mean we don't ever get to talk about the things that actually matter
A game developed by a very small team can have a more focused vision while also taking more creative risks. These larger games that keep coming out late seem to be unoriginal at the same time.
I suspect that these larger games have team performance issues where they've brought on too many younger developers who aren't moving things forward while treating scrum like a show and tell. I talked to this person about this problem and I checked in this minor change after testing this bs issue etc. Meanwhile the more productive workers jumped ship years ago.
This is wild speculation but it wouldn't shock me that they have the same "day care software" teams that has been talked about with FAANG. Management loves saving money and this is what they get. (All speculation, again)
I was on several different failed projects, though not in gaming. One thing that's clear is once a project slips, it slips more and more until all the momentum is gone and you're going through the motions. So even when a game is finally shipped, all the heart is gone.
As toxic as "crunch time" development is, it ensures devs stay focused and don't just clock it in.
I am surprised that time was never brought up here. Especially for the mention of the Disney+ IP machines, it seems obvious to me that when you’re trying to release multiple movies and multiple tv shows every single year, enshittification will follow. On the topic of how these shows look, a lot of that, I suspect, is because they’re CONSTANTLY plagued with reshoots and are afraid to due anything practical or remotely consistent as a result.
I don’t think “everyone working at Hollywood and Triple-A games forgot how to make a game” is particularly true. You yourself mention how games seem to be overwhelmingly shifting towards Young Adult prose—seeing as this is a sweeping trend happening all at once that doesn’t seem particularly creatively motivated, seems obvious that it’s a corporate trend!
On the topic of Concord, while I don’t think “bad management” explains everything, I don’t think “make a triple-A super realistic Overwatch clone that’s sort of like guardians of the galaxy” left the Concord team much to work with. And hey, given how nearly every single Live Service effort from Sony has turned out, bad management probably WAS a large culprit.
This problem isn't unique to gaming, is it? Hollywood is seeing the exact same problems. Out of control budgets, ever slower production and cratering audience figures even for what should be reliable IPs. Disney's Snow White being a notorious example of the problem, but it's endemic. Severance was a huge hit for Apple TV+ but seems likely to have made a loss due to absurdly lax cost control.
You're probably underplaying the problem of wokeness. It isn't just that it upsets potential customers (and that is a huge issue, regardless of whether you like them or not). It's that wokeness degrades management skill across an organization by insisting on the hiring and promotion of people based on ideology, even if they can't deliver. After enough years of this organizational effectiveness is trashed, ability to take on board feedback is trashed, ability to impose deadline pressure is trashed (would create a hostile workplace!) and so on.
Look at all the companies that are failing hardest right now, and what you see is always the same: they fail at their core mission by prioritizing ideology whilst telling themselves it's virtuous to be losing money because it proves they're fighting the good fight. The people making the bad decisions can't be removed for the same reasons, which is why Kathleen Kennedy sticks around.
The fix is simple enough, though unlikely to happen anytime soon: new studios need to be set up that have a policy of refusing to hire woke people. Once a culture of excellence is restored, the ability to ship will be restored with it.
Bad Management in the “too lose” sense makes good sense to me as a IT Architect (not gaming industry).
Dovetails nicely with a more general pet peeve of mine:
Complex projects requires discipline and discipline requires consequences.
The game industry attracts people attracted to “recreative IT” rather than “IT built for specific organizational needs”.
That means that the game industry in general can get away with lower wages, because “the dream job” score is high.
However that also means that the rate of “disillusioned employees” will be higher and the “ego battles” of the people hired ro be visionaries cause “scope slide and creep” issues.
I remeber reading Wired about the process at the end of the Pixar golden age of animation, and the horror of the milestones, when the creatives were hit by a hard deadline and “whatever they had now would have to do”.
Discipline and letting go of your dreams is harder to practise by employees, and the higherups are under increasing pressure to deliver the next big thing across multiple platforms and with a flexibility to facilitate additional income streams.
It’s not getting easier to reach the finish line in a controlled manner
Delivering AAA games today is way harder than before
I was waiting for you to mention Expedition 33 as a counterrexample -- well, if the rumors are true. They say 30 French people came together under one visionary director and released an AAA quality project beloved by all and finished in a reasonable timeframe. Would be interesting to get an insider's perspective on what their apparent success means to the industry at large.
Until the last minute I had some mentions of Expedition 33 in here that I removed because the discourse around it became very messy.
I've seen a lot of takes about what we can learn from Expedition 33 but in many cases the authors are just making things up that support their existing world view. It's hard for me to draw many conclusions from a business / production angle because the details of production are opaque.
I have no idea what the budget for 33 was. When they secured funding was it on the back of an impressive-looking game or something grey-boxed? How many assets did they create in-house vs contract out vs buy?
I'm planning to writing something about Expedition 33, but more about design takeaways, as those are much clearer. I might touch on the business / production side a bit, but to have firm opinions I'd need more insight into the production.
At a high level the thing that stands out to me is that while plenty of indie games break out they tend to be either small in scope and scrappy, or from studios that are technically "indie" but large. (Warhorse Studios, for example, is over 200 people) This is a mid-sized studio that made something convincingly "AAA." It seems like they were able to leverage Unreal features like Metahumans and eschewed a "build it here from scratch" mindset. That said, I don't know the budget of the game, so I don't know how much of the success to attribute to savvy technology use and whatnot. But if I had to come up with some takeaway it's that there are the tools in place to make AAA-looking things on a budget, as long as you're willing to play within the box of those tools.
Concord was a hypnotically bizarre event to me, I started watching some of the Youtubers you mention out of sheer disbelief over what was happening, and a few weeks after, when it was all done, most of those Youtubers I moved on from. But there were plenty of people willing to be fair to the game, including on Youtube. Dare I say it when developers make good games; there are influencers that would fall over them themselves to recommend those games to their viewers.
Well put.
Totally disagree on the Concord concept art vs. execution though. Execution there is worse in every way, and needlessly so. It looks like a bad cosplay of the concept art. Yes in both cases the character is "of girth" and obviously wearing some sort of "upcycled" thing from a landfill. But. In the first the character's pose and bearing is heroic, if not aggressive. In the latter it is slovenly. The details in the first say "I made these modifications and repairs myself, and they do Important Stuff(tm)." The latter says "I just found this crap and strapped it together. Nothing matters."
The former is bulky and sturdy, the latter is puffy and ugly. The first is worn and scuffed from use. The latter looks like damage from abuse and neglect. The palette in the first is grungy, subtly muted. The latter looks like it was salvaged from a grimy play place in an off-brand fast food chain. The differences are subtle, yes, but that little tweak in saturation and drop in contrast between elements makes a huge difference, as it often does in artwork.
I could just keep ranting here almost indefinitely. All of these things I just ranted about were unforced errors. There are no conceivable technical limitations here.
These details matter. Character designs matter, because you're asking players to commit to endless hours of inhabiting those characters, projecting themselves onto them, letting the characters project themselves onto the player.
Nobody wants to play a slovenly character who doesn't take her job seriously and obviously doesn't want to be there. Let that personality reflect itself in your mindset as you play the game and what happens? You don't take the game seriously and you don't want to be there.
The whole lineup was like that. Nobody wanted to play those characters, so nobody found out whether the gameplay was "fine".
I don't really disagree with your take on the character design - I said many of the same things when I first say this comparison. In particularly the puffiness combined with the material that looks more like sofa pleather than metal (the materials are an across-the-board problem IMO) looks silly - like someone pumped air into the costume.
That said I don't love the visible "intestines" on the older image. But, more to the point, this level of change from the original concept (which I do think is better) doesn't strike me as out of the ordinary.
You can see a bunch of concept art here:
https://www.artstation.com/amandakiefer
I think these concepts do look better than what was shipped, but they aren't that different, and they use an art style that the game didn't try to replicate so it's a bit apples-to-oranges.
Had Concord shipped with those character designs I don't think it would have made much difference. But I do agree that compared to the concept some of the final versions almost look parodic or silly, and that's especially true of this particular character. (And Daw)
The only AAA games I've played in the last decade are:
- V Rising
- Dark Souls
- Mario Kart 8 DX
- SSBU
- XCOM 2
- No Man's Sky (although this was like... 7 years after it was released, so idunno)
And of them, I've only played MK8 and Dark Souls this calendar year. There are tons of indie, or even AA games that are incredibly good. Drill Core, Jupiter Hell, Balatro, UFO 50, Abiotic Factor, Slay the Spire, Noita, the whole Kingdom series, Pokerogue, I could go on all day, have sucked so much more time than nearly any big release.
You mention the inconsistency of blaming management, is it doing too much or too little, etc.
"Management" is the coward's road to mediocrity. Creative endeavors and new things need LEADERSHIP. Which means the leader makes the core decisions, and is accountable for success or failure, with a career affected by those results.
Your article makes it crystal-clear that this is lacking.
Bethesda is a prime example where something has fundamentally broken on a process level there. They can no longer release games on anything resembling a timely schedule. Multiple console generations have passed since the last elder scrolls game and it’s nowhere near release. Ditto fallout. They spent years and years on starfield and it was mediocre. They just don’t seem capable of releasing quality games or really games at all anymore
The gap in elder scrolls games is perfectly fine, they released three whole games between that, one of which is a GaaS.
I suspect a large amount of their woes has to do with being beholden to that engine of theirs, Creation Engine. They attempted to make a new one for Starfield too but it’s very obviously built on the bones of the original in all the worst ways.
On the writing point and footnote: Is this disconnect mostly because the kind of people who work as professional writers at game studios are themselves very in-tune to mass market genre fiction trends (ie YA) in ways the consumers aren’t?
In some sense this feels like games being infected with a broader narrowing of writing register among the goodreadsy people who read and write and self-identify with fantasy fiction the most, rather than something endogenous.
I don't have a good non-speculative answer. I assume that game writers are more in line with genre fiction trends than the gaming audience, which leans male and probably isn't composed of big readers.
The game industry doesn't employ many writers on writing-forward games, so I suspect games writing is even more susceptible to being trend-driven than other aspects of game production.
I'm hoping that the success of Expedition 33 will help make more sincere writing fashionable again. I find a lot of popular entertainment is written from the perspective of "what would these characters say in this situation, were they on an amusing TV show?" instead of "were this were really happening."
Might help on the sincerity front that gamers and critics have language for this that doesn’t as strongly evoke culture war; lots of ”whedon-speak” namedrops online last couple years!
i feel iffy about the lack of willingness to touch on culture war issues
specifically... i remember back when i was in school, everyone had mandatory community service, and i managed to get someine to sign off on "serving on wikipedia's conflict mediation team" as a community service, which was honestly a great formative experience. most conflicts were pretty small and personal.
but i got randomly assigned to mediate one conflict in particular, about the history of a specific, unusually-designed bridge's engineering, that had clearly been infected by tribalism. the participants hated each other with a passion. this felt bizarre to me at the time; why would they be so mad over what specific engineering principles kept a bridge from collapsing?
In the mediator guidelines, they told us to drill down to object level issues as quickly as possible. So I did. I asked them why this issue was controversial and what actual bridge engineers had to say about it. they responded... strangely. they acted like they expected me to not want to touch the controversial issue at all, and instead strike any mention of engineering from the article. but since i was immediately diving into the controversy, it was as if i was asking whose team I should join. and they considered this a violation of the expectation of neutrality.
and there was indeed a "neutral" editor among them, who had carefully never stated his opinions at all about how bridges refrain from collapsing, and he in particular got really mad at me and reported me to the mediation noticeboard for a failure to maintain neutrality.
i think about that event a lot. Every once in awhile I go back and check the article, to see if anybody has written about how an extremely strangely designed a bridge actually works, and the article continues to not even talk about it. which really annoys me, because the bridge looks like it ought to fall into the river pretty much immediately.
But once the issue became controversial, actually trying to figure out the truth of the matter became... gauche? taboo? idk.
When chuds like asmongold might have legitimate culture-war complaints about games, your response isn't "ugh, my tribal enemies might have a point that i have to acknowledge" but more like "ugh, someone who actually deigned to step down into the muck of tribal politics might have a point that i have to acknowledge"
and it just reminds me of that bridge article
My philosophy for the most part is to just talk about the underlying issue (in your case, the bridge construction) and not give much oxygen to the culture war aspects. The Battlefield trailer looked weird and I think it's fine to say that without worrying too much about which side that's scoring points for. To some degree when we tread too carefully we give outrage-peddlers the power to set the agenda.
That said. were I working on a game that was under culture war scrutiny I probably wouldn't want to acknowledge any points, even if they were valid, because that conversation not only becomes a huge pain in the ass but also you get people bothering you on social media, quoting you out of context to make you look bad, etc.
I think it's totally fair for critics or other developers to say the writing in Dragon Age isn't great - we don't have to pretend it's great to score points in a culture war battle. But expecting that actual writers of Dragon Age to admit that the writing isn't great is asking a lot. It's never easy to admit that something didn't turn out as well as you hoped but when people are looking to turn that into culture war ammo I get just not bothering with the conversation at all.
An added wrinkle is that some of the people saying "look, all culture war bullshit aside the writing isn't great" aren't actually putting the culture war bullshit aside, and in fact their main objections *are* culture-war related. I saw something similar with True Detective Season 4 - I don't think it's particularly well written but a lot of the people saying it had "bad writing" were upset that it was woman-lead, including some people who swore up and down that they *weren't* upset about that.
all fair points, it just leaves me feeling uneasy
In particular, with the controversy over the Wikipedia article in question, it was the exact underlying issues that were culture warred
like, imagine a world in which there was a 'red' and a 'blue' position on whether we should use 1990s dual stick controls for FPSes, or 2010 controls
There's no law of the universe that says that the actual underlying issues, the issues that actually matter in objective reality, can't be exactly the issues that get politicized
in fact... i think it's sort of more likely than not? people care about things that matter, therefore things that matter get politicized
And if we decide that we're only ever going to talk about things that are not politicized, it might mean we don't ever get to talk about the things that actually matter
Your entire premise falls apart because of the malaise is well present with the Japanese.
A game developed by a very small team can have a more focused vision while also taking more creative risks. These larger games that keep coming out late seem to be unoriginal at the same time.
I suspect that these larger games have team performance issues where they've brought on too many younger developers who aren't moving things forward while treating scrum like a show and tell. I talked to this person about this problem and I checked in this minor change after testing this bs issue etc. Meanwhile the more productive workers jumped ship years ago.
This is wild speculation but it wouldn't shock me that they have the same "day care software" teams that has been talked about with FAANG. Management loves saving money and this is what they get. (All speculation, again)
I was on several different failed projects, though not in gaming. One thing that's clear is once a project slips, it slips more and more until all the momentum is gone and you're going through the motions. So even when a game is finally shipped, all the heart is gone.
As toxic as "crunch time" development is, it ensures devs stay focused and don't just clock it in.
I am surprised that time was never brought up here. Especially for the mention of the Disney+ IP machines, it seems obvious to me that when you’re trying to release multiple movies and multiple tv shows every single year, enshittification will follow. On the topic of how these shows look, a lot of that, I suspect, is because they’re CONSTANTLY plagued with reshoots and are afraid to due anything practical or remotely consistent as a result.
I don’t think “everyone working at Hollywood and Triple-A games forgot how to make a game” is particularly true. You yourself mention how games seem to be overwhelmingly shifting towards Young Adult prose—seeing as this is a sweeping trend happening all at once that doesn’t seem particularly creatively motivated, seems obvious that it’s a corporate trend!
On the topic of Concord, while I don’t think “bad management” explains everything, I don’t think “make a triple-A super realistic Overwatch clone that’s sort of like guardians of the galaxy” left the Concord team much to work with. And hey, given how nearly every single Live Service effort from Sony has turned out, bad management probably WAS a large culprit.
“There’s an understandable reluctance to give an inch on anything culture-war related, but these days everything is culture war related.”
Well, are you going to help smash the patriarchy, or are you going to help ship a successful game?
This problem isn't unique to gaming, is it? Hollywood is seeing the exact same problems. Out of control budgets, ever slower production and cratering audience figures even for what should be reliable IPs. Disney's Snow White being a notorious example of the problem, but it's endemic. Severance was a huge hit for Apple TV+ but seems likely to have made a loss due to absurdly lax cost control.
You're probably underplaying the problem of wokeness. It isn't just that it upsets potential customers (and that is a huge issue, regardless of whether you like them or not). It's that wokeness degrades management skill across an organization by insisting on the hiring and promotion of people based on ideology, even if they can't deliver. After enough years of this organizational effectiveness is trashed, ability to take on board feedback is trashed, ability to impose deadline pressure is trashed (would create a hostile workplace!) and so on.
Look at all the companies that are failing hardest right now, and what you see is always the same: they fail at their core mission by prioritizing ideology whilst telling themselves it's virtuous to be losing money because it proves they're fighting the good fight. The people making the bad decisions can't be removed for the same reasons, which is why Kathleen Kennedy sticks around.
The fix is simple enough, though unlikely to happen anytime soon: new studios need to be set up that have a policy of refusing to hire woke people. Once a culture of excellence is restored, the ability to ship will be restored with it.
It's scope. There's no market for billion dollar games, not like there was.
Bad Management in the “too lose” sense makes good sense to me as a IT Architect (not gaming industry).
Dovetails nicely with a more general pet peeve of mine:
Complex projects requires discipline and discipline requires consequences.
The game industry attracts people attracted to “recreative IT” rather than “IT built for specific organizational needs”.
That means that the game industry in general can get away with lower wages, because “the dream job” score is high.
However that also means that the rate of “disillusioned employees” will be higher and the “ego battles” of the people hired ro be visionaries cause “scope slide and creep” issues.
I remeber reading Wired about the process at the end of the Pixar golden age of animation, and the horror of the milestones, when the creatives were hit by a hard deadline and “whatever they had now would have to do”.
Discipline and letting go of your dreams is harder to practise by employees, and the higherups are under increasing pressure to deliver the next big thing across multiple platforms and with a flexibility to facilitate additional income streams.
It’s not getting easier to reach the finish line in a controlled manner
Delivering AAA games today is way harder than before
I was waiting for you to mention Expedition 33 as a counterrexample -- well, if the rumors are true. They say 30 French people came together under one visionary director and released an AAA quality project beloved by all and finished in a reasonable timeframe. Would be interesting to get an insider's perspective on what their apparent success means to the industry at large.
Until the last minute I had some mentions of Expedition 33 in here that I removed because the discourse around it became very messy.
I've seen a lot of takes about what we can learn from Expedition 33 but in many cases the authors are just making things up that support their existing world view. It's hard for me to draw many conclusions from a business / production angle because the details of production are opaque.
I have no idea what the budget for 33 was. When they secured funding was it on the back of an impressive-looking game or something grey-boxed? How many assets did they create in-house vs contract out vs buy?
I'm planning to writing something about Expedition 33, but more about design takeaways, as those are much clearer. I might touch on the business / production side a bit, but to have firm opinions I'd need more insight into the production.
At a high level the thing that stands out to me is that while plenty of indie games break out they tend to be either small in scope and scrappy, or from studios that are technically "indie" but large. (Warhorse Studios, for example, is over 200 people) This is a mid-sized studio that made something convincingly "AAA." It seems like they were able to leverage Unreal features like Metahumans and eschewed a "build it here from scratch" mindset. That said, I don't know the budget of the game, so I don't know how much of the success to attribute to savvy technology use and whatnot. But if I had to come up with some takeaway it's that there are the tools in place to make AAA-looking things on a budget, as long as you're willing to play within the box of those tools.
Thanks. Looking forward to your further thoughts.