BioWare is an example of what poor senior leadership can do even to a legendary studio. If you look at their output for the last decade it’s really hard to point to any of the games and hand on heart say the idea sounds fun.
- “Anthem” was literally built to be full of grindy bullshit right from day 1.
- “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” was a total travesty. SkillUp called it a “collosal disappointment” and said the writing made “every interaction (between characters) sounds like HR is in the room”
- “Mass Effect: Andromeda” I remember reading a review which says “the game has already become its own meme at this point”. Even people who were charitable to it admitted it was worse in just about every respect than the trilogy that it followed.
…And things are going to get worse before they get better. If you turn your gaze onto another legendary studio with train-wreck management, I can’t conceive of Elder Scrolls 6 being any good given that I found Fallout 4 disappointing and since then everything Bethesda has put out since then (just their own in-house stuff, not things they publish so I’m thinking of Id and Arkane as separate here) has been a catastrophe. In a sign of how bad the mismanagement is there, Id software which has put out banger after banger which have been commercially and critically successful has seen significant layoffs in spite of that. “Starfield” was terrible, “Fallout 76” was unquestionably one of the worst games of all time at launch (although they have somewhat improved it since then). Elder Scrolls 6 will have the same dead-eyed, dumb NPCs, the same disastrously poor writing, the same jank as “Starfield”.
The desire by execs to grow studios into these behemoths has led to them losing track of what makes games fun.
Both Anthem and Veilguard are examples of exactly what the article is talking about - Bioware, a studio famous for scripted single player RPGs where the focus is on story, being pushed by EA into making live service games for an audience which have "skip dialogue" as a reflex reaction to anything that isn't more shooting or optimising DPS.
err, at least for Veilguard you're missing the point that the dialogue was preachy and stupid. It was a doomed concept when they started forcing bullshit into the game.
Yeah the problem here is "doing a bad job". This is the problem with a lot of things. Everyone wants to analyze the shit out of everything when it's just simple. If you do a terrible job you fail. If the organization under someone's leadership does a terrible job then, almost certainly, they were terrible leaders (and/or were constrained in what they were able to do; regardless, somebody was a terrible leader. I'm certainly inclined to think it was EA).
In terms of pure gameplay and mechanics, the first Mass Effect is incredibly rough, it's really hard to go back to.
That it was such a success and led to an incredibly successful franchise despite that, shows the power of its writing and strong characters and world-building.
A similar thing goes for another legendary series: Assassin's Creed. The first game is borderline unplayable, but it was still enough of a success to spawn AC2 which was a masterpiece of storytelling, although the fundamental mechanics weren't really smooth yet even at that point, and improvements were made all the way through brotherhood to AC3 and then black flag.
Over time, the story-telling and characters weakened, although there were some gems along the way such as odyssey.
And I really enjoyed Veilguard, I think the combat systems were just great and I loved taking on all the optional challenges towards the end. Some of the side character interactions were very good too - Lace and Emrich especially. But it doesn't change the fact that overal the game wasn't that good.
I'd take this person's opinion with a heavy grain of salt. They didn't sell to EA to grow, but because BioWare was failing. AI recreating games has nothing to do with BioWare being shut down and is therefore a red herring. The execs might not know how to make games, but BioWare has both been extremely slow at developing games and put out multiple failures in a row.
If you want truly creative games, it won't be AAA game studios but indie game devs. AAA game studios play a different game (pun intended) and it will serve its audience and more especially, their shareholders. There is enough space in the world for them and truly creative indie game studios.
We used to have AA studios that produced something in between those though. Not all types of games lend themselves to indie scale and I'd argue that (C)RPGs are one of those.
Microsoft acquired Kojima for the name not the game. Blizzard is producing next to nothing but means to generate revenue with Microsoft's money. As far as I can tell anything gaming that touches Microsoft/EA money is dead. WoW Forever is quite literally the cheapest way to make a quick dollar, and extend that $15/mo subscription "forever"
Too many words that don't refute the fact that how great Kojima might have been in past productions, without Microsoft's deal, he would have had to close shop instead.
Indie games often cater to whatever the devs found fun as kids, that kind of creates it's own kind of stagnation.
The indie boom of the late 00s and early 10s was to a certain degree the result of odd creatives working the Flashgame community (cut-throat in itself) being forced out onto other platforms as it died combined with other platforms providing monetization possibilities.
As with everything, once there was money to be found the vultures moved in.
I guess the question is what is "truly creative" for you? Does Half-Life Alyx count? How about the original Half-Life? Pong? Outer Wilds?
To me the likelyhood of a creative game coming from AAA studio is less likely than indie. Basically the same as movies. It can happen, but a truly creative game/movie/story is hard to come by in any sense. Was it the Ilyiad?
While the philosophy is always interesting on what an original thought is, in this context most folks use terms like "truly creative" as a proxy for "something folks enjoy that doesn't feel like a copy of something else". Emphasis on _feel_.
yea, if thats the case then I feel that AAA studios release creative things all the time. GTA for example, Alyx to name two. I guess it is always easier to buy creativity when you are a giant studio.
What, Alyx is literally "Half-Life, but in VR". It's fiarly polished but the concept is not creative at all. They barely even pushed the overall series plot forward and there's like one whopping new character.
I think there is still roughly the same number of worthwhile games that get released each year, they are just buried by a ever increasing pile of shit.
Or what the indie space is complaining about recently: copycats as soon as they show anything of their ostensibly original idea, vibe coded and released with a similar name as soon as possible.
Which isn't a new problem, it's just a lot faster and more prevalent. I really hope Valve (the premier marketplace for PC and indie games, alongside Itch) cracks down on it and hands out things like a "seal of quality" to separate slop from serious attempts at making games.
(because they earn money from everything and they have no real competition they don't actually crack down on slop, just like the various app stores don't care much about shovelware as long as it earns them money).
This has been my feeling as well. Even less so actually. There are realllly good games release nowadays. Like literally insane level of quality. But you also get an insane amount of stinkers. And those stinkers are increasingly coming from AAA studies.
There is shovelware at any level, but at the same time I think indie games have been a more consistent stream of good memorable entries than big budget studios the last 10 years.
I really have to rack my mind to find think of anything that I feel has been memorable the last decade, and even then half of them are AA titles (and many Japanese, dunno if it's the gambare ethos or what's up with that, maybe I'm a closet weeb). Nioh 2. KCD2. Expedition 33. Yakuza: Like A Dragon but not the sequel. The Elden Ring DLC. Prey 2017. Doom 2016 and Eternal. I guess Stalker 2 has been getting pretty good too.
For good indie games I can drop dozens of names without stopping to think. There's Hollow Knight and Silksong, Hedon, The Drifter, Lunacid, Cruelty Squad, Voin, Paradise Killer, Blue Prince, Fallen Aces, Not For Broadcast, Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, Immortality, Axiom Verge, The Blind Prophet, Cross Code, Cultist Simulator, Astalon, Dread Delusion, The Witness, The Signifier, ... I can keep going.
Indie game devs cant deliver the kind of more cinematic experiences that Bioware could, or that Square-Enix can with Final Fantasy, at least not graphics-wise. Maybe if AI further matures smaller studios can do that too eventually, but right now AAA-studios have AAA-budgets that are required.
We don't really want creative games. We do want fun ones. Fundamentally, games are fun mechanics paired with a narrative that supports the mechanics. Note that the narrative is supportive, and fun is primary.
Maximizing profit often points the gaming cos towards gating the fun behind a paywall, or teasing the fun that could be had behind the next payment. It turns out that players don't find that fun (see Star Wars Battefront 2).
Tetris + Minecraft tied for first, Wii Sports at fourth, then Terraria at 7th, and Super Mario Bros. and Human: Fall Flat at 10th.
The other half are evidence to your point with possibly the exception of Mario Kart 8. But if we look even further down the list, we see a lot of once-small, indie titles with brand-new for the time gameplay or heavily perfected mechanics like Stardew Valley, The Sims, the original Pokemons, Wii Fit, Sonic, etc.
If anything, you're speaking to a very specific subcultural market of what I'd probably call gamer bros who are obsessed with getting good K/D ratios, streaks, and other Skinner-box adjacent rewards systems. The other large consumer markets include children who prefer simplicity with depth and the huge market of non-gamer-bros who are the ones buying Terraria and Stardew.
I would really like to get into the gaming industry, despite the horror stories you regularly hear about working conditions. The main problem for me is that I'm really old (>50), and there's no industry near where I live.
And this is where things get... a bit weird - game developers that want to make a living out of what they do are competing with people who'd do it for free and who have no risk if their thing fails. It's the same in most creative fields - why would my employer pay for a band or dj at corporate events if we have some hobbyists working for us that will play for free / for fun?
Especially with the recent slew of layoffs in the gaming industry. One anecdotal report from a local small time game dev said they'd get hundreds, if not thousands of responses to an open position, both domestic and international from recently fired game developers.
It's a really weird market, it's both one of the biggest industries in the world (bigger than music and movies combined), yet also high unemployment and poor working conditions / work/life balance, with AI throwing another spanner in the works. Meanwhile a lot of people that want to work in it aren't just in it for the money, they have genuine passion for the craft / industry - which is actually rare in most IT jobs, most enterprise jobs aren't exactly exciting material.
I know what he said:D What I was trying to subtly get at is that tooling and knowledge is available, so why does he need organizational support? I am not asking willy nilly.
Thanks, I believe you're asking in good faith. But note that I wasn't necessarily asking for support, I'm often times just openly interested in any kind of feedback.
Like I said, there is no industry near I live, but I'm committed to my area because of the family.
Also, without having tried at all, I'm doubtful whether I could land a gig. Even though I've worked in and around IT most of my professional live, I don't have any relevant experience. And I doubt that I could work in an entry-level position: I'm old on the one hand (not attractive for employers) and have more bills to pay now than I did in my 20s (not attractive for me).
I suspect you may be getting ahead of yourself by going straight to thinking about landing a paying gig. Everyone I know who ever even thought about getting into games started out by making them as a hobby. You might need a few years’ worth of that under your belt before you would have enough of a portfolio to compete for jobs.
It also gives you a chance to see how much you like it before you commit. If you don’t enjoy it enough to keep up doing it purely for fun, you might not like it enough to want to do it as a high pressure career choice.
No worries. And it is a fair reason. I was merely curious. That said, it is now the best and worst time to try ( and you won't know which until you do ).
This is likely an unpopular opinion, but I think the devs and the people actually involved in the game development are at fault.
It's not like the execs are coming up to the meeting room and saying "Hey, let's make a shitty game because I am an idiot who wants to lose money...".
Their games are just bad, man. They don't know how to write a good story like in the first mass effect, they don't know what makes a game fun, and this is the natural result.
Games in general, but specifically AAA+ games, have an insanely risky business model. From early concept to release is often 4+ years of heads down development with zero revenue. Tastes and trends change within that time and what may have been a compelling concept 4 years ago might seem stale by release. Then there is balancing the game which is a monumental challenge in itself; when you've been playing the same game for several years you lose perspective on what's fun or not, what is easy/difficult, etc.
XBOX will be the big validation of the model. They purposefully chose an executive who doesn't know a thing about videogames. The business side is obviously important, but can a videogame company be successful if it's run by bean counting business optimizers? I doubt it, but time will tell.
The new CEO has been praised by consumers to hear their feedback and steer the company in new directions, eg guaranteeing physical disks, defocusing from AI features, etc.
So even if she doesn't know about creating video games, I wouldn't judge her as "a business first gamers last" type of person.
I think I only heard good about her for a very brief period after she took the helm. After that it's been mostly "Xbox is a disaster" with studios being closed, hardware getting more expensive and whatnot. I don't actually believe that Xbox is going to do much with physical media going forwards and they're probably not backing down from AI much either (at least in private). I imagine what happens with Project Helix is going to dictate her legacy (unless Microsoft shuffles her out before that).
isn't XBOX dead already? that's the common sentiment I see.
as the console product line, it's just dead, nobody knows which xbox is the old or the new one, microsoft themselves probably can't figure that out too.
the issue with game execs is not just that they don't understand game development, but software development in general. game execs absolutely love scope creep. then they try to fight the growing scope by adding more people onto the project - when it's common knowledge that makes the project even more delayed. if you can't deliver a project, you have to deliver less, not add employees.
writing this I thought this might be why live service games fare better.
they force the modern agile software engineering into games. the exec gets feedback and kpi's quickly. you could try to scream some sense into them however much you want, but they won't accept that their idea is crap until it's released and the sentiment rating on their dashboard goes down in response.
the exec has absolutely no imagination or domain knowledge. without the constant feedback, they just fly blind because they can't comprehend anything but the numbers in the spreadsheet. in a multi-year development process, until you deliver the project, there's no numbers to steer you. you need an opinionated director, auteur, not an excel monkey.
Is it run by the bean counting optimizer is the question.
There are some business people who are bean counters - they understand the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They will get rid of expensive engineers and then be shocked that they can't keep making money with the same version of the same game for all time.
There are other business people who know the usefulness of engineers making new product. However they don't understand the value and will hire too many and so the company will fail because the profit margins are not there.
You need the compromise. Nobody likes a compromise.
What I find weird is that these companies don't sound like they are run by bean counters... The budgets are something that sound absolutely insane if anyone who cared about costs were involved. It more sounds like they are run by empire builders and their legions of micromanaging middle-managers...
I believe that with the budgets but it's crazy we don't see more risks from a creative perspective. In order for the VC model to work, you need to take risks for asymmetric payoffs. In the end, I guess management would rather follow the internal herd and play it safe.
Compare it more to movie production and book publishing. Where we also see a pattern of the big budget stuff being risk averse and the really creative stuff happening downmarket. Often so far downmarket that the creators themselves end up being the primary financiers.
I assume they don't see themselves as a video game company anymore (although the marketing won't reflect that). They see themselves as a media company with IP to be mined.
Nope. He was head of Microsoft Game Studios Europe from 2001-2008 until he took over globally. By that point the only Halo game to come from Bungie was Reach.
It's even worse than that. The execs at these companies don't just not make games, they don't play games, either. They fundamentally cannot understand what makes a good game because they don't engage with the medium, and do not care to.
Probably not a popular take, but it's fairly common to have CEO's for big company who where never part of the production of one of the product they company sells. The idea is that at some point, your business is so large and oversee too many projects. Intuition, and experience doesn't cut it. Big firm want rationalization. This is why management become obsess with metrics, KPI and such. It rationalizes business decision.
This won't be business that innovate, but that's not what their investor wants. Shareholders at EA want predictable reasonable growth, and governance match that. You don't get brought up by EA, Microsoft, Activision, etc, and then act surprise that management want you to produce "generic AAA game with a coat of paint based on X popular franchise".
Innovation and risk taking is something that smaller business do.
That kind of stuff is why the film industry has cycles of actors starting production companies, overturning the hierarchy with their money and successes, followed by them getting bored, selling out, the business becoming more businesslike until they start forking enough money to actors again that they again can produce their own stuff.
Netflix and co, might upend or stall that cycle, same as Steam/MS/etc can stagnate the games business.
I think games still has a cycle or two before being totally stagnant though, but regulators are working hard to fix that.
That business model is at odds with any creative enterprise. It's one thing to scale a business that has a successful product that needs very little improvement over time other than efficiency gains which can be handled by a management class whose only involvement needs to be ensuring the core model is maintained and not degraded while improving operational efficiency. It's a very different thing to having to constantly innovate and create new and better products especially when those products need their own artistic merit to stand on. If you're just making the next FIFA game you'll be fine but anything that requires a plot will go over like a lead balloon.
Yes, it's the industrialization of culture. The music and movie industry shows us exactly how that works out. Big major and big studio don't innovate, they sell you well known name, reinforce it with marketing, and buy up the latest trend from smaller studio. Nothing new under the sun. Company like EA or Activision will continue to buy smaller studio that managed to get a few decent game going, will milk the franchise while its popular, then get rid of it.
That's true. They've discovered that strategy works since they can use their strengths (concentrated capital, business knowledge, lawyers, distribution system) to profit off of their competition and destroy them at the same time. It's a pretty terrible outcome for players since it destroys small studios which in the past would have used the funds from their previous success to develop more ambitious creative projects. Now those future products get managed to death and are less artistically interesting because they can't rock the boat.
There is very few companies where the executives don't engage with their own product. Imaging a film studio where the CEO has never watched a movie, or a publishing house where the CEO doesn't read books.
I don't think you need to enjoy the product personally but you do need to engage with the medium at the very least to be able to understand what you are selling and to whom you should listen for feedback.
Yes, but in the interview he was talking about creating games, not consuming. I am pretty sure that CEO at those big companies probably have played game in their life. They might not be hardcore gamer who fire up Dota 2 after work, but they likely engage with the medium. I mean, the current EA CEO has had a long career being involved in the sport division of EA.
There are examples like back in February when Chris Kempczinski posted his infamous sampling of a McDonald's meal (even though he apparently does eat McDonalds regularly, he didn't put on a very good show of it). Steve Jobs famously not letting his kids use iPads. Howard Moskowitz initially refusing to drink soda during an interview and saying "I'm not a soda drinker. It's not good for your teeth." and then when persuaded to do so describing it as terrible and overwhelming. The most relevant one would be Strauss Zelnick who said in a 2025 interview "I'm not a gamer. I don't play videogames at all. I'm not the Consumer-in-Chief." justifying it by saying that his job is to hire talented developers and let them make the decisions but I would question whether you can choose the right talent if you don't understand the audience for the products they'll make.
It's very easy for executives and management to be so disconnected from the people who make up the market they are serving. When success is determined by innovation that serves that market, detachment can be a fatal flaw.
On the other hand, FromSoftware, creators of games such as dark souls, bloodborne, and elden ring, placed their main director as CEO. He still directs their main games, and admits to focus more on games than on business.
The trend has been they focus on quality, rarely compromising their vision, which started as niche gameplay ideas that are now a new genre, adopted in many new games. And the effect has been that they got a reputation for quality, and sell more and more games with each new release, with elden ring selling like 36M copies.
FromSoft has less than 500 employees. They are a big studio, but still a studio. They are not a publisher with a large portfolio like EA or Activision, MS, etc. Different business, different governance. FromSoft is owned by kadokawa, who's current CEO is an MBA dude.
That's not the question here. But regardless, it doesn't matter what we need, it's what the system incentivizes. Being the owner of a studio, even a big successful one like FromSoftware, comes with a lot of risk. One bad game and everything can go tits up. Studio owners therefor often have an interest in “derisking” by selling of part of the company ownership. The buyers are often publishers who see those studios as supplier and need to secure their delivery for a while, diversify, etc. This is exactly like the music and movie industries (or any cultural industry in general).
I mean, even in the software industry, this is the modus opperandi for a lot of business : Founder of startup focus on the product and growth until they become valuable enough to be brought up by one of the big company.
I think Innovation in big companies does happen, but often it get's stiffled by the bean counters before something comes by it, but that is also a good thing. Small businesses should always have the potential to bring the goliath to its knees if the big business has outlived is usefulness to society as a whole.
The best boss I ever had was a MBA who know nothing about engineering - he didn't try to micromanage us. However there are a lot of MBAs who are bad bosses.
But that brings up important point, is this complaint about execs in any way specific to games industry? It is very common across businesses that execs haven't actually done grassroots work in their companies field?
It's much worse than they havent played games at all. They would probably object and say that they do play games, they've played some mario cart that one time, and they play mario party and some monopoly game with their children. They almost certainly have played at least a few brief moments of their flagship games at a show or something.
They assume their own experience is more or less what everyone else has, including their players. A sort of dabbling, disinterested experience, flowing from one piece of content to another.
It is worse than not having played games at all because when people around them take on the task of making games with intensity and zeal and solemnity and great care, they can roll their eyes and think "it's not that serious, nobody really cares about this stuff". When people have passionate arguments about creative direction they feel they can see the bigger picture and rise above the petty squabbles by saying that the artistic direction doesn't matter. They know it doesn't matter, because it doesn't matter to them, and to all the other people who, presumably, are like them.
I think that they are wrong, but I think the task of explaining to them why they are wrong is like trying to teach a devout atheist why religion matters. It will be a long and hard uphill battle and in many cases likely utterly impossible.
> They assume their own experience is more or less what everyone else has, including their players. A sort of dabbling, disinterested experience, flowing from one piece of content to another.
Actually with games this is a huge problem that players and even creators have.
Due to the different play styles and player types it seems very hard for people to understand that there are other player types. This is one of the main drivers for conflict in the gaming space. People think all players experience games the same, they are not.
One classic example is in MMO's like WOW where you have a clear distinction between the PVP and PVE playertypes, PVP players are usually "Killers" while PVE players are usually "Explorers". (Bartle taxonomy of player types)
"If you try to please everyone, you'll end up pleasing no one"
This isn't to say that games (and other media) should always be laser focused on one type of person but you do have to use good judgement to decide who your audience is, what they like and what you should leave out of the game. MMOs show some natural segregation of players when they have private servers, you end up with many PvP only or PvE only servers along with many other variations of things the game mechanics and mods allow e.g. strict role play servers.
There's even terminology directly related to your quote, casual gamers vs hardcore gamers and it should be well known by now that if you make compromises in your game to suit both you'll end up being disliked by both. It's better to lean in to one play style a measured amount. If you're making a game with PvP as a core mechanic make sure the PvP experience is good but not so hardcore that it alienates people who are new to PvP. Don't sacrifice important parts of the gameplay because you might also want to attract PvE only players.
Not defending execs but having worked in games for nearly a decade, it is difficult for even the most passionate game studios to really understand what makes a good game. Creative processes are difficult; and for every BioWare or hot indie darling there are probably 10 or more studios who've failed and that you've never heard of.
^ Exactly; every game, and especially every new IP, is a risk. There's some checklists they will pass over but those are no guarantee.
Mass Effect or Dragon Age could've flopped like Anthem did and we would never hear from them again. In fact the first Mass Effect was pretty rough in terms of gameplay, as was the first Witcher game (and arguably the later ones and Cyberpunk because they all needed serious rework and bugfixing after release). Yet they're still popular because something else compensated for their technical issues.
> I can't imagine anyone qualified to run billion dollar projects has much time for any interests other than running billion dollar projects.
Seems to me that understanding their product (core product) and the market is one of the major parts of their job. Even if that means getting informed by your r&d and sales department to steer the development department.
counter example: Concord
We are seeing that there are a lot of players that did stop rewarding the companies as described. The problem is that the signals are not being picked up in these studio's. Partially due to the big divide between critical acclaim vs player reception that we have been seeing in games in the past decade.
The business side is more critical than the development side - so business folks should be running what is a business. If the business goes down, it'll take the down game, however great it is.
The big but though, is that to be a successful business you need to feed, nurture and protect the creative side. The creative side in turn has a responsibility to the business - if you've burnt through a hundred million and decide you need to start-over, that's on you.
My completely uninformed opinion is that once the business screws with dev ("Let's turn this thoughful narrative game, into a free-to-play-shooter!") dev probably just check out, do what they're told, and take the pay-cheque until it stops. I'm not a game dev, but I've had dumb corporate overlords.
Basically EA can burn in hell - but the development side is rarely faultless.
I don't think Indie games "are better" - but I think they tend to better deliver on a coherent vision. Most crash and burn, but the few that make it to my Steam account are wonderful. Not because they're all perfect - but because I heard a voice in it.
Well sure, and I suppose the bosses at McDonald’s never bother to taste all the regional variations of their burgers, right? Personally, I suspect that in the future, the biggest indie game developers might band together into a single publishing collective. In such an organization, everyone right down to the janitowould understand how games are actually made. Most importantly, they would grasp at every level of the hierarchy that independence and creativity in the decision making process are the essential ingredients that make a game something we, the players, truly desire.
> Well sure, and I suppose the bosses at McDonald’s never bother to taste all the regional variations of their burgers, right?
This is a funny thing to post after the recently viral video of the McDonalds CEO allegedly not being able to take a bite out of a McDonalds burger without gagging.
Your comparison also doesn't make sense, it's more like the executives of AAA game studio's have never seen or bothered to understand how a game is made.
To keep the fastfood analogy perhaps it would be similar to the McDonalds CEO never having cooked or stepped into a kitchen, and would never choose to eat a burger.
It's like if the CEO of Warner brothers has never set foot on a set or in Hollywood or even never seen a movie.
I suspect (as the comment from Zeschuk also suggests) most AAA game studio's are run by executives that never played a video game in their lives let alone enjoyed it. And they literately don't know how the sausage is made.
"BioWare is not, like, a guy. BioWare closing is not like Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino getting fired or cancelled.
BioWare is a business entity that existed for 30 years. During that time people — including lead creatives who were responsible for the great games — came and went.
Some video game studios manage to maintain a culture and a sensibility around excellence and the key creatives either stick around for a long time or pass the reins to handpicked successors who share their values and preserve the culture and standards of the studios.
What has happened in the game industry over the last 15 years is that there came to be a widespread belief that the cultures that incubated excellent games were exclusionary racist, sexist, homophobic boys clubs that needed to change in order to welcome in different kinds of people.
Instead of hiring people who shared their values and sensibilities, the people at these game studios were pressured to push their workforces toward being 50% female while achieving racial equity. The staff of the studios changed dramatically, the cultures of the workplaces changed dramatically and the games changed dramatically.
The pandemic sent a lot of people into their homes to play video games, which seemed like it was going to drive an era of growth for the industry. At the same time, the new generation of gaming hardware required more detailed assets, more animation, and therefore more people to make these massive games.
So there was a huge hiring boom at the precise moment that there was an overarching focus of the demographics of the industry, which means that nearly every Western game studio’s workforce was completely transformed. Over 40% of games industry workers under the age of 25 identified as LGBT or nonbinary on recent surveys.
Additionally, some studios have had unique pressures that have driven a lot of turnover. At Rocksteady Games, for example, a lot of the people who made the Batman: Arkham trilogy were not interested in building the live service game Warner wanted, so most of the principals on those games left the studio during the production of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
The studio cannot pivot back to what used to be its strength at making single player titles after that failure because all the people who are responsible for the classic games are gone. They no longer have that strength. They no longer have the institutional capacity to make great games because great games are made by great people and the great people are gone. A similar thing happened to BioWare during “Anthem.”
They couldn’t just pivot back to making great “Dragon Age” or “Mass Effect” games after the failure of “Anthem” because too many people were gone and the culture had changed. They weren’t the same studio and they weren’t a great studio anymore.
The BioWare that was shuttered today is not the studio that made “Mass Effect 2” or “Knights of the Old Republic.” That studio hasn’t existed for many years. It was just the “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” studio."
I think the best answer is AAAA+ scale projects. AI has destroyed the demand for something that can be produced in a few months. The "meso" scale of game development is extremely difficult to work in. Constantly walking a tightrope between too easy and too hard. Rockstar games does seem to have the right idea. They can remain viable by simply never reducing their feature scope and spending unlimited amounts of money.
Perhaps enough indie game studios could align their thinking at the same time to accomplish a similar outcome. In any case, pooling of talent and resources is probably the only way to compete now. The individual developer simply cannot keep up despite being able to do more than they ever were before.
If you seek evidence of Jevon's paradox I think you may find it here. Albeit in a very undesirable form. Even if I can now do 100% more work per unit time, my prospective customer is demanding 300-400% on top of that in terms of the final delivered experience. The water level has gone up everywhere and continues to rise rapidly. Even outside of game development. Deliverables that would have elicited reverence from the business twelve months ago are completely unrecognized now.
> AI has destroyed the demand for something that can be produced in a few months.
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure how AI could destroy the demand here.
> Deliverables that would have elicited reverence from the business twelve months ago are completely unrecognized now.
Again, not sure how this relates to BioWare. Andromeda and Veilguard were both widely regarded as embarrassing failures and both of those were pre-AI. They hadn't released any titles in the AI age before dissolving.
> Perhaps enough indie game studios could align their thinking at the same time to accomplish a similar outcome. In any case, pooling of talent and resources is probably the only way to compete now.
Phantom Blade Zero just came out. It was made by S-Game, which apparently has fewer than 20 core staff members, though the game was worked on by around 200 people when you include contractors. It sold 4 million units in 3 days and is currently the #2 most played game on Steam.
Smaller game studios can do fine. They just need to make good games.
> I'm not sure how AI could destroy the demand here.
By overwhelming the supply. How can a consumer keep track of what to play anymore?
As an example, I didn't even hear about PBZ until you mentioned it just now. The fact that Valve might occasionally select lottery winners is separate from other forces involved. I would hesitate to highlight the occasional breakout (artificially-promoted) success as some kind of evidence that there is nothing to see here.
> By overwhelming the supply. How can a consumer keep track of what to play anymore?
This was a problem pre-AI, too. There's more AI-generated slop at the bottom of the barrel but in general people were not discovering games by scrolling through every new release on Steam. And certainly they weren't doing that for anything with the budget of Andromeda or Veilguard.
> As an example, I didn't even hear about PBZ until you mentioned it just now.
I think this is on you more than anything, PBZ has been getting heavily hyped up and currently has 60k viewers on Twitch, early on a Monday in the US, which is pretty damn good. The existence or non-existence of AI games doesn't seem to be impacting anything here.
> the occasional breakout (artificially-promoted) success
All success in the entertainment is "artificially-promoted". Marketing exists for a reason.
Imho the strength of Indie games was being able to try ideas too risky to bet AAA budget on, or to target niche audiences deemed too small to make AAA profit
Neither of these is going away. The marketing strategy of teasing your game for months or years to build a fan base is going away. But if you life by "put up or shut up" I believe there is still room to win on vision alone.
If you don't have a unique enough vision (like most AAA, visions are risky) then I agree that you have to migrate up and just outspend everyone else
BioWare is an example of what poor senior leadership can do even to a legendary studio. If you look at their output for the last decade it’s really hard to point to any of the games and hand on heart say the idea sounds fun.
- “Anthem” was literally built to be full of grindy bullshit right from day 1.
- “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” was a total travesty. SkillUp called it a “collosal disappointment” and said the writing made “every interaction (between characters) sounds like HR is in the room”
- “Mass Effect: Andromeda” I remember reading a review which says “the game has already become its own meme at this point”. Even people who were charitable to it admitted it was worse in just about every respect than the trilogy that it followed.
…And things are going to get worse before they get better. If you turn your gaze onto another legendary studio with train-wreck management, I can’t conceive of Elder Scrolls 6 being any good given that I found Fallout 4 disappointing and since then everything Bethesda has put out since then (just their own in-house stuff, not things they publish so I’m thinking of Id and Arkane as separate here) has been a catastrophe. In a sign of how bad the mismanagement is there, Id software which has put out banger after banger which have been commercially and critically successful has seen significant layoffs in spite of that. “Starfield” was terrible, “Fallout 76” was unquestionably one of the worst games of all time at launch (although they have somewhat improved it since then). Elder Scrolls 6 will have the same dead-eyed, dumb NPCs, the same disastrously poor writing, the same jank as “Starfield”.
The desire by execs to grow studios into these behemoths has led to them losing track of what makes games fun.
Both Anthem and Veilguard are examples of exactly what the article is talking about - Bioware, a studio famous for scripted single player RPGs where the focus is on story, being pushed by EA into making live service games for an audience which have "skip dialogue" as a reflex reaction to anything that isn't more shooting or optimising DPS.
err, at least for Veilguard you're missing the point that the dialogue was preachy and stupid. It was a doomed concept when they started forcing bullshit into the game.
Veilguard was doomed long before your complaint about "bullshit" in a game. That's not why it failed.
Yeah the problem here is "doing a bad job". This is the problem with a lot of things. Everyone wants to analyze the shit out of everything when it's just simple. If you do a terrible job you fail. If the organization under someone's leadership does a terrible job then, almost certainly, they were terrible leaders (and/or were constrained in what they were able to do; regardless, somebody was a terrible leader. I'm certainly inclined to think it was EA).
Personally I think Mass Effect Andromeda has the best gameplay of the series but everything else ranges from just okay to bad
In terms of pure gameplay and mechanics, the first Mass Effect is incredibly rough, it's really hard to go back to.
That it was such a success and led to an incredibly successful franchise despite that, shows the power of its writing and strong characters and world-building.
A similar thing goes for another legendary series: Assassin's Creed. The first game is borderline unplayable, but it was still enough of a success to spawn AC2 which was a masterpiece of storytelling, although the fundamental mechanics weren't really smooth yet even at that point, and improvements were made all the way through brotherhood to AC3 and then black flag.
Over time, the story-telling and characters weakened, although there were some gems along the way such as odyssey.
Unfortunately "gameplay" wasn't why the franchise was popular or bought by their fans.
And I really enjoyed Veilguard, I think the combat systems were just great and I loved taking on all the optional challenges towards the end. Some of the side character interactions were very good too - Lace and Emrich especially. But it doesn't change the fact that overal the game wasn't that good.
I'd take this person's opinion with a heavy grain of salt. They didn't sell to EA to grow, but because BioWare was failing. AI recreating games has nothing to do with BioWare being shut down and is therefore a red herring. The execs might not know how to make games, but BioWare has both been extremely slow at developing games and put out multiple failures in a row.
If you want truly creative games, it won't be AAA game studios but indie game devs. AAA game studios play a different game (pun intended) and it will serve its audience and more especially, their shareholders. There is enough space in the world for them and truly creative indie game studios.
We used to have AA studios that produced something in between those though. Not all types of games lend themselves to indie scale and I'd argue that (C)RPGs are one of those.
For the most part, yes. We luckily still have AAA studios run by creative developers like Kojima
If it wasn't for Microsoft money, he would not have a studio any longer, after Sony was done sponsoring him.
Microsoft acquired Kojima for the name not the game. Blizzard is producing next to nothing but means to generate revenue with Microsoft's money. As far as I can tell anything gaming that touches Microsoft/EA money is dead. WoW Forever is quite literally the cheapest way to make a quick dollar, and extend that $15/mo subscription "forever"
Too many words that don't refute the fact that how great Kojima might have been in past productions, without Microsoft's deal, he would have had to close shop instead.
I don’t know about this. I feel like nowadays it is just as rare for an indie game to be truly creative.
There are certain genres that the big AAA studios basically pump out and certain genres that indie devs basically pump out.
Indie games often cater to whatever the devs found fun as kids, that kind of creates it's own kind of stagnation.
The indie boom of the late 00s and early 10s was to a certain degree the result of odd creatives working the Flashgame community (cut-throat in itself) being forced out onto other platforms as it died combined with other platforms providing monetization possibilities.
As with everything, once there was money to be found the vultures moved in.
I guess the question is what is "truly creative" for you? Does Half-Life Alyx count? How about the original Half-Life? Pong? Outer Wilds?
To me the likelyhood of a creative game coming from AAA studio is less likely than indie. Basically the same as movies. It can happen, but a truly creative game/movie/story is hard to come by in any sense. Was it the Ilyiad?
While the philosophy is always interesting on what an original thought is, in this context most folks use terms like "truly creative" as a proxy for "something folks enjoy that doesn't feel like a copy of something else". Emphasis on _feel_.
yea, if thats the case then I feel that AAA studios release creative things all the time. GTA for example, Alyx to name two. I guess it is always easier to buy creativity when you are a giant studio.
What, Alyx is literally "Half-Life, but in VR". It's fiarly polished but the concept is not creative at all. They barely even pushed the overall series plot forward and there's like one whopping new character.
I agree.
The required investment is just a lot larger in AAA. So just from a risk management perspective, people look to reduce the risk level.
Doesn’t really lend itself to creativity unless people involved have a track record.
I think there is still roughly the same number of worthwhile games that get released each year, they are just buried by a ever increasing pile of shit.
I'm not so pessimistic: while the ratio is getting worse, there are more good and interesting games coming out, and the best ones are getting better.
Or what the indie space is complaining about recently: copycats as soon as they show anything of their ostensibly original idea, vibe coded and released with a similar name as soon as possible.
Which isn't a new problem, it's just a lot faster and more prevalent. I really hope Valve (the premier marketplace for PC and indie games, alongside Itch) cracks down on it and hands out things like a "seal of quality" to separate slop from serious attempts at making games.
(because they earn money from everything and they have no real competition they don't actually crack down on slop, just like the various app stores don't care much about shovelware as long as it earns them money).
This has been my feeling as well. Even less so actually. There are realllly good games release nowadays. Like literally insane level of quality. But you also get an insane amount of stinkers. And those stinkers are increasingly coming from AAA studies.
There is shovelware at any level, but at the same time I think indie games have been a more consistent stream of good memorable entries than big budget studios the last 10 years.
I really have to rack my mind to find think of anything that I feel has been memorable the last decade, and even then half of them are AA titles (and many Japanese, dunno if it's the gambare ethos or what's up with that, maybe I'm a closet weeb). Nioh 2. KCD2. Expedition 33. Yakuza: Like A Dragon but not the sequel. The Elden Ring DLC. Prey 2017. Doom 2016 and Eternal. I guess Stalker 2 has been getting pretty good too.
For good indie games I can drop dozens of names without stopping to think. There's Hollow Knight and Silksong, Hedon, The Drifter, Lunacid, Cruelty Squad, Voin, Paradise Killer, Blue Prince, Fallen Aces, Not For Broadcast, Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, Immortality, Axiom Verge, The Blind Prophet, Cross Code, Cultist Simulator, Astalon, Dread Delusion, The Witness, The Signifier, ... I can keep going.
Indie game devs cant deliver the kind of more cinematic experiences that Bioware could, or that Square-Enix can with Final Fantasy, at least not graphics-wise. Maybe if AI further matures smaller studios can do that too eventually, but right now AAA-studios have AAA-budgets that are required.
The hardware needed to render those AAA cinematic experiences is more expensive than ever though.
I have a very nice PC for gaming and even still most games I play looks like it could run on a potato XD
Perfect, I skip cut-scenes usually anyway. Ain't nobody got time for that.
We don't really want creative games. We do want fun ones. Fundamentally, games are fun mechanics paired with a narrative that supports the mechanics. Note that the narrative is supportive, and fun is primary.
Maximizing profit often points the gaming cos towards gating the fun behind a paywall, or teasing the fun that could be had behind the next payment. It turns out that players don't find that fun (see Star Wars Battefront 2).
You're going to need a mountain of research to prove you can separate fun from creativity/novelty.
Not really. Top ten spots for highest grossing games sold are half comprised predominantly of low-budget, gameplay innovative titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
Tetris + Minecraft tied for first, Wii Sports at fourth, then Terraria at 7th, and Super Mario Bros. and Human: Fall Flat at 10th.
The other half are evidence to your point with possibly the exception of Mario Kart 8. But if we look even further down the list, we see a lot of once-small, indie titles with brand-new for the time gameplay or heavily perfected mechanics like Stardew Valley, The Sims, the original Pokemons, Wii Fit, Sonic, etc.
If anything, you're speaking to a very specific subcultural market of what I'd probably call gamer bros who are obsessed with getting good K/D ratios, streaks, and other Skinner-box adjacent rewards systems. The other large consumer markets include children who prefer simplicity with depth and the huge market of non-gamer-bros who are the ones buying Terraria and Stardew.
It's interesting to me that I pointed to fun game mechanics as primary and you point to Tetris and Minecraft as counterpoints.
I would really like to get into the gaming industry, despite the horror stories you regularly hear about working conditions. The main problem for me is that I'm really old (>50), and there's no industry near where I live.
You can just start making games. In my game dev group we have a bunch of experienced programmers.
Nothing is stopping you from downloading Unity or Godot.
The actual business sucks though. It’s very hard to make money or stay employed. Industry legends are on LinkedIn soft begging for work*.
Edit: Work , not workers.
It’s a fantastic hobby though
> It’s a fantastic hobby though
And this is where things get... a bit weird - game developers that want to make a living out of what they do are competing with people who'd do it for free and who have no risk if their thing fails. It's the same in most creative fields - why would my employer pay for a band or dj at corporate events if we have some hobbyists working for us that will play for free / for fun?
You're also competing with extremely talented people in Vietnam or Indonesia who can live well off 8$ an hour.
The odds of making enough money to match even a lower end tech salary are astronomically low.
But learning Unity to learn programming is how I became a programmer in the first place. I’ve done very well for myself.
Even now I find games push me to develop my skills. Vs actual work which is usually boring.
It was when I saw Derek Yu and Alec Holowka release Aquaria that I realized there's no gatekeeping anymore. Make your game.
However, if you're looking to be part of a larger team, that is indeed a challenge with the limitations you mentioned.
Especially with the recent slew of layoffs in the gaming industry. One anecdotal report from a local small time game dev said they'd get hundreds, if not thousands of responses to an open position, both domestic and international from recently fired game developers.
It's a really weird market, it's both one of the biggest industries in the world (bigger than music and movies combined), yet also high unemployment and poor working conditions / work/life balance, with AI throwing another spanner in the works. Meanwhile a lot of people that want to work in it aren't just in it for the money, they have genuine passion for the craft / industry - which is actually rare in most IT jobs, most enterprise jobs aren't exactly exciting material.
The real question is what exactly is stopping you right now?
He's really old (>50) and there's no gaming industry near where he lives.
I know what he said:D What I was trying to subtly get at is that tooling and knowledge is available, so why does he need organizational support? I am not asking willy nilly.
Oh got it, was on the fence if it was a willy nilly question or not.
But I agree, kleiba should give it a go. I don't want to downplay the value of a co-located team with industry experience but these can be overcome.
Thanks, I believe you're asking in good faith. But note that I wasn't necessarily asking for support, I'm often times just openly interested in any kind of feedback.
Like I said, there is no industry near I live, but I'm committed to my area because of the family.
Also, without having tried at all, I'm doubtful whether I could land a gig. Even though I've worked in and around IT most of my professional live, I don't have any relevant experience. And I doubt that I could work in an entry-level position: I'm old on the one hand (not attractive for employers) and have more bills to pay now than I did in my 20s (not attractive for me).
I suspect you may be getting ahead of yourself by going straight to thinking about landing a paying gig. Everyone I know who ever even thought about getting into games started out by making them as a hobby. You might need a few years’ worth of that under your belt before you would have enough of a portfolio to compete for jobs.
It also gives you a chance to see how much you like it before you commit. If you don’t enjoy it enough to keep up doing it purely for fun, you might not like it enough to want to do it as a high pressure career choice.
No worries. And it is a fair reason. I was merely curious. That said, it is now the best and worst time to try ( and you won't know which until you do ).
This is likely an unpopular opinion, but I think the devs and the people actually involved in the game development are at fault.
It's not like the execs are coming up to the meeting room and saying "Hey, let's make a shitty game because I am an idiot who wants to lose money...".
Their games are just bad, man. They don't know how to write a good story like in the first mass effect, they don't know what makes a game fun, and this is the natural result.
Have any of the Bioware execs even played a game?
Havy any of Bioware's developers?
blaming everyone but themselves for years and years while coasting off the legacy of others
Games in general, but specifically AAA+ games, have an insanely risky business model. From early concept to release is often 4+ years of heads down development with zero revenue. Tastes and trends change within that time and what may have been a compelling concept 4 years ago might seem stale by release. Then there is balancing the game which is a monumental challenge in itself; when you've been playing the same game for several years you lose perspective on what's fun or not, what is easy/difficult, etc.
XBOX will be the big validation of the model. They purposefully chose an executive who doesn't know a thing about videogames. The business side is obviously important, but can a videogame company be successful if it's run by bean counting business optimizers? I doubt it, but time will tell.
The new CEO has been praised by consumers to hear their feedback and steer the company in new directions, eg guaranteeing physical disks, defocusing from AI features, etc.
So even if she doesn't know about creating video games, I wouldn't judge her as "a business first gamers last" type of person.
> guaranteeing physical disks
I wouldn't be so sure about that
I think I only heard good about her for a very brief period after she took the helm. After that it's been mostly "Xbox is a disaster" with studios being closed, hardware getting more expensive and whatnot. I don't actually believe that Xbox is going to do much with physical media going forwards and they're probably not backing down from AI much either (at least in private). I imagine what happens with Project Helix is going to dictate her legacy (unless Microsoft shuffles her out before that).
isn't XBOX dead already? that's the common sentiment I see.
as the console product line, it's just dead, nobody knows which xbox is the old or the new one, microsoft themselves probably can't figure that out too.
the issue with game execs is not just that they don't understand game development, but software development in general. game execs absolutely love scope creep. then they try to fight the growing scope by adding more people onto the project - when it's common knowledge that makes the project even more delayed. if you can't deliver a project, you have to deliver less, not add employees.
writing this I thought this might be why live service games fare better. they force the modern agile software engineering into games. the exec gets feedback and kpi's quickly. you could try to scream some sense into them however much you want, but they won't accept that their idea is crap until it's released and the sentiment rating on their dashboard goes down in response.
the exec has absolutely no imagination or domain knowledge. without the constant feedback, they just fly blind because they can't comprehend anything but the numbers in the spreadsheet. in a multi-year development process, until you deliver the project, there's no numbers to steer you. you need an opinionated director, auteur, not an excel monkey.
Is it run by the bean counting optimizer is the question.
There are some business people who are bean counters - they understand the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They will get rid of expensive engineers and then be shocked that they can't keep making money with the same version of the same game for all time.
There are other business people who know the usefulness of engineers making new product. However they don't understand the value and will hire too many and so the company will fail because the profit margins are not there.
You need the compromise. Nobody likes a compromise.
What I find weird is that these companies don't sound like they are run by bean counters... The budgets are something that sound absolutely insane if anyone who cared about costs were involved. It more sounds like they are run by empire builders and their legions of micromanaging middle-managers...
I imagine it is bean counters but like VC bean counters... You dump a butt load of cash into games hoping they'll be the next GTA V or Skyrim
I believe that with the budgets but it's crazy we don't see more risks from a creative perspective. In order for the VC model to work, you need to take risks for asymmetric payoffs. In the end, I guess management would rather follow the internal herd and play it safe.
Compare it more to movie production and book publishing. Where we also see a pattern of the big budget stuff being risk averse and the really creative stuff happening downmarket. Often so far downmarket that the creators themselves end up being the primary financiers.
I assume they don't see themselves as a video game company anymore (although the marketing won't reflect that). They see themselves as a media company with IP to be mined.
> They see themselves as a media company with IP to be mined.
stares in Minecraft
I believe on of the responsibilities of C suite of executives was to put clarity on how the chicken is cook.
Wasn’t Phil Specter former head of Xbox a big part of the original Halo franchise?
I thought he did the string arrangements on the White Album
Nope, Let it Be. They later stripped it and released Let it Be: Naked. George Martin was still on the White Album.
Nope. He was head of Microsoft Game Studios Europe from 2001-2008 until he took over globally. By that point the only Halo game to come from Bungie was Reach.
It's even worse than that. The execs at these companies don't just not make games, they don't play games, either. They fundamentally cannot understand what makes a good game because they don't engage with the medium, and do not care to.
Probably not a popular take, but it's fairly common to have CEO's for big company who where never part of the production of one of the product they company sells. The idea is that at some point, your business is so large and oversee too many projects. Intuition, and experience doesn't cut it. Big firm want rationalization. This is why management become obsess with metrics, KPI and such. It rationalizes business decision. This won't be business that innovate, but that's not what their investor wants. Shareholders at EA want predictable reasonable growth, and governance match that. You don't get brought up by EA, Microsoft, Activision, etc, and then act surprise that management want you to produce "generic AAA game with a coat of paint based on X popular franchise".
Innovation and risk taking is something that smaller business do.
That kind of stuff is why the film industry has cycles of actors starting production companies, overturning the hierarchy with their money and successes, followed by them getting bored, selling out, the business becoming more businesslike until they start forking enough money to actors again that they again can produce their own stuff.
Netflix and co, might upend or stall that cycle, same as Steam/MS/etc can stagnate the games business.
I think games still has a cycle or two before being totally stagnant though, but regulators are working hard to fix that.
That business model is at odds with any creative enterprise. It's one thing to scale a business that has a successful product that needs very little improvement over time other than efficiency gains which can be handled by a management class whose only involvement needs to be ensuring the core model is maintained and not degraded while improving operational efficiency. It's a very different thing to having to constantly innovate and create new and better products especially when those products need their own artistic merit to stand on. If you're just making the next FIFA game you'll be fine but anything that requires a plot will go over like a lead balloon.
Yes, it's the industrialization of culture. The music and movie industry shows us exactly how that works out. Big major and big studio don't innovate, they sell you well known name, reinforce it with marketing, and buy up the latest trend from smaller studio. Nothing new under the sun. Company like EA or Activision will continue to buy smaller studio that managed to get a few decent game going, will milk the franchise while its popular, then get rid of it.
That's true. They've discovered that strategy works since they can use their strengths (concentrated capital, business knowledge, lawyers, distribution system) to profit off of their competition and destroy them at the same time. It's a pretty terrible outcome for players since it destroys small studios which in the past would have used the funds from their previous success to develop more ambitious creative projects. Now those future products get managed to death and are less artistically interesting because they can't rock the boat.
There is very few companies where the executives don't engage with their own product. Imaging a film studio where the CEO has never watched a movie, or a publishing house where the CEO doesn't read books. I don't think you need to enjoy the product personally but you do need to engage with the medium at the very least to be able to understand what you are selling and to whom you should listen for feedback.
Yes, but in the interview he was talking about creating games, not consuming. I am pretty sure that CEO at those big companies probably have played game in their life. They might not be hardcore gamer who fire up Dota 2 after work, but they likely engage with the medium. I mean, the current EA CEO has had a long career being involved in the sport division of EA.
There are examples like back in February when Chris Kempczinski posted his infamous sampling of a McDonald's meal (even though he apparently does eat McDonalds regularly, he didn't put on a very good show of it). Steve Jobs famously not letting his kids use iPads. Howard Moskowitz initially refusing to drink soda during an interview and saying "I'm not a soda drinker. It's not good for your teeth." and then when persuaded to do so describing it as terrible and overwhelming. The most relevant one would be Strauss Zelnick who said in a 2025 interview "I'm not a gamer. I don't play videogames at all. I'm not the Consumer-in-Chief." justifying it by saying that his job is to hire talented developers and let them make the decisions but I would question whether you can choose the right talent if you don't understand the audience for the products they'll make.
It's very easy for executives and management to be so disconnected from the people who make up the market they are serving. When success is determined by innovation that serves that market, detachment can be a fatal flaw.
On the other hand, FromSoftware, creators of games such as dark souls, bloodborne, and elden ring, placed their main director as CEO. He still directs their main games, and admits to focus more on games than on business.
The trend has been they focus on quality, rarely compromising their vision, which started as niche gameplay ideas that are now a new genre, adopted in many new games. And the effect has been that they got a reputation for quality, and sell more and more games with each new release, with elden ring selling like 36M copies.
FromSoftware is an order of magnitude smaller than the giants of the industry, and don't need to fund the development of multiple AAA games per year.
FromSoft has less than 500 employees. They are a big studio, but still a studio. They are not a publisher with a large portfolio like EA or Activision, MS, etc. Different business, different governance. FromSoft is owned by kadokawa, who's current CEO is an MBA dude.
Do we need big publishers to own studios?
That's not the question here. But regardless, it doesn't matter what we need, it's what the system incentivizes. Being the owner of a studio, even a big successful one like FromSoftware, comes with a lot of risk. One bad game and everything can go tits up. Studio owners therefor often have an interest in “derisking” by selling of part of the company ownership. The buyers are often publishers who see those studios as supplier and need to secure their delivery for a while, diversify, etc. This is exactly like the music and movie industries (or any cultural industry in general).
I mean, even in the software industry, this is the modus opperandi for a lot of business : Founder of startup focus on the product and growth until they become valuable enough to be brought up by one of the big company.
I think Innovation in big companies does happen, but often it get's stiffled by the bean counters before something comes by it, but that is also a good thing. Small businesses should always have the potential to bring the goliath to its knees if the big business has outlived is usefulness to society as a whole.
Hey, everybody (who matters) knows that an MBA can successfully manage any kind of firm; there is no field-specific knowledge required, nosirree.
The best boss I ever had was a MBA who know nothing about engineering - he didn't try to micromanage us. However there are a lot of MBAs who are bad bosses.
But that brings up important point, is this complaint about execs in any way specific to games industry? It is very common across businesses that execs haven't actually done grassroots work in their companies field?
As an MBA, I can confirm. We might not necessarily do it well, but we can do it:D
As long as share price goes up while you are there does anything else really matter?
MBAs are the best, Plato knew this
It's much worse than they havent played games at all. They would probably object and say that they do play games, they've played some mario cart that one time, and they play mario party and some monopoly game with their children. They almost certainly have played at least a few brief moments of their flagship games at a show or something.
They assume their own experience is more or less what everyone else has, including their players. A sort of dabbling, disinterested experience, flowing from one piece of content to another.
It is worse than not having played games at all because when people around them take on the task of making games with intensity and zeal and solemnity and great care, they can roll their eyes and think "it's not that serious, nobody really cares about this stuff". When people have passionate arguments about creative direction they feel they can see the bigger picture and rise above the petty squabbles by saying that the artistic direction doesn't matter. They know it doesn't matter, because it doesn't matter to them, and to all the other people who, presumably, are like them.
I think that they are wrong, but I think the task of explaining to them why they are wrong is like trying to teach a devout atheist why religion matters. It will be a long and hard uphill battle and in many cases likely utterly impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
You can extend this to the amount of interest in games, casual vs competitive gamers.
"If you try to please everyone, you'll end up pleasing no one"
This isn't to say that games (and other media) should always be laser focused on one type of person but you do have to use good judgement to decide who your audience is, what they like and what you should leave out of the game. MMOs show some natural segregation of players when they have private servers, you end up with many PvP only or PvE only servers along with many other variations of things the game mechanics and mods allow e.g. strict role play servers.
There's even terminology directly related to your quote, casual gamers vs hardcore gamers and it should be well known by now that if you make compromises in your game to suit both you'll end up being disliked by both. It's better to lean in to one play style a measured amount. If you're making a game with PvP as a core mechanic make sure the PvP experience is good but not so hardcore that it alienates people who are new to PvP. Don't sacrifice important parts of the gameplay because you might also want to attract PvE only players.
Not defending execs but having worked in games for nearly a decade, it is difficult for even the most passionate game studios to really understand what makes a good game. Creative processes are difficult; and for every BioWare or hot indie darling there are probably 10 or more studios who've failed and that you've never heard of.
^ Exactly; every game, and especially every new IP, is a risk. There's some checklists they will pass over but those are no guarantee.
Mass Effect or Dragon Age could've flopped like Anthem did and we would never hear from them again. In fact the first Mass Effect was pretty rough in terms of gameplay, as was the first Witcher game (and arguably the later ones and Cyberpunk because they all needed serious rework and bugfixing after release). Yet they're still popular because something else compensated for their technical issues.
Okay, devil's advocate:
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) cost over $700 million to make.
I can't imagine anyone qualified to run billion dollar projects has much time for any interests other than running billion dollar projects.
These projects wouldn't be sustainable without an audience of gamers rewarding it with purchases and microtransactions.
counter example: Concord
We are seeing that there are a lot of players that did stop rewarding the companies as described. The problem is that the signals are not being picked up in these studio's. Partially due to the big divide between critical acclaim vs player reception that we have been seeing in games in the past decade.
and I'm OK with most of that.
The business side is more critical than the development side - so business folks should be running what is a business. If the business goes down, it'll take the down game, however great it is.
The big but though, is that to be a successful business you need to feed, nurture and protect the creative side. The creative side in turn has a responsibility to the business - if you've burnt through a hundred million and decide you need to start-over, that's on you.
My completely uninformed opinion is that once the business screws with dev ("Let's turn this thoughful narrative game, into a free-to-play-shooter!") dev probably just check out, do what they're told, and take the pay-cheque until it stops. I'm not a game dev, but I've had dumb corporate overlords.
Basically EA can burn in hell - but the development side is rarely faultless.
I don't think Indie games "are better" - but I think they tend to better deliver on a coherent vision. Most crash and burn, but the few that make it to my Steam account are wonderful. Not because they're all perfect - but because I heard a voice in it.
Well sure, and I suppose the bosses at McDonald’s never bother to taste all the regional variations of their burgers, right? Personally, I suspect that in the future, the biggest indie game developers might band together into a single publishing collective. In such an organization, everyone right down to the janitowould understand how games are actually made. Most importantly, they would grasp at every level of the hierarchy that independence and creativity in the decision making process are the essential ingredients that make a game something we, the players, truly desire.
> Well sure, and I suppose the bosses at McDonald’s never bother to taste all the regional variations of their burgers, right?
This is a funny thing to post after the recently viral video of the McDonalds CEO allegedly not being able to take a bite out of a McDonalds burger without gagging.
Your comparison also doesn't make sense, it's more like the executives of AAA game studio's have never seen or bothered to understand how a game is made. To keep the fastfood analogy perhaps it would be similar to the McDonalds CEO never having cooked or stepped into a kitchen, and would never choose to eat a burger. It's like if the CEO of Warner brothers has never set foot on a set or in Hollywood or even never seen a movie.
I suspect (as the comment from Zeschuk also suggests) most AAA game studio's are run by executives that never played a video game in their lives let alone enjoyed it. And they literately don't know how the sausage is made.
This coming from a BioWare exec is rich:
"BioWare is not, like, a guy. BioWare closing is not like Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino getting fired or cancelled.
BioWare is a business entity that existed for 30 years. During that time people — including lead creatives who were responsible for the great games — came and went.
Some video game studios manage to maintain a culture and a sensibility around excellence and the key creatives either stick around for a long time or pass the reins to handpicked successors who share their values and preserve the culture and standards of the studios.
What has happened in the game industry over the last 15 years is that there came to be a widespread belief that the cultures that incubated excellent games were exclusionary racist, sexist, homophobic boys clubs that needed to change in order to welcome in different kinds of people.
Instead of hiring people who shared their values and sensibilities, the people at these game studios were pressured to push their workforces toward being 50% female while achieving racial equity. The staff of the studios changed dramatically, the cultures of the workplaces changed dramatically and the games changed dramatically.
The pandemic sent a lot of people into their homes to play video games, which seemed like it was going to drive an era of growth for the industry. At the same time, the new generation of gaming hardware required more detailed assets, more animation, and therefore more people to make these massive games.
So there was a huge hiring boom at the precise moment that there was an overarching focus of the demographics of the industry, which means that nearly every Western game studio’s workforce was completely transformed. Over 40% of games industry workers under the age of 25 identified as LGBT or nonbinary on recent surveys.
Additionally, some studios have had unique pressures that have driven a lot of turnover. At Rocksteady Games, for example, a lot of the people who made the Batman: Arkham trilogy were not interested in building the live service game Warner wanted, so most of the principals on those games left the studio during the production of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
The studio cannot pivot back to what used to be its strength at making single player titles after that failure because all the people who are responsible for the classic games are gone. They no longer have that strength. They no longer have the institutional capacity to make great games because great games are made by great people and the great people are gone. A similar thing happened to BioWare during “Anthem.”
They couldn’t just pivot back to making great “Dragon Age” or “Mass Effect” games after the failure of “Anthem” because too many people were gone and the culture had changed. They weren’t the same studio and they weren’t a great studio anymore.
The BioWare that was shuttered today is not the studio that made “Mass Effect 2” or “Knights of the Old Republic.” That studio hasn’t existed for many years. It was just the “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” studio."
https://x.com/DanFriedman81/status/2113096028698149135
I think the best answer is AAAA+ scale projects. AI has destroyed the demand for something that can be produced in a few months. The "meso" scale of game development is extremely difficult to work in. Constantly walking a tightrope between too easy and too hard. Rockstar games does seem to have the right idea. They can remain viable by simply never reducing their feature scope and spending unlimited amounts of money.
Perhaps enough indie game studios could align their thinking at the same time to accomplish a similar outcome. In any case, pooling of talent and resources is probably the only way to compete now. The individual developer simply cannot keep up despite being able to do more than they ever were before.
If you seek evidence of Jevon's paradox I think you may find it here. Albeit in a very undesirable form. Even if I can now do 100% more work per unit time, my prospective customer is demanding 300-400% on top of that in terms of the final delivered experience. The water level has gone up everywhere and continues to rise rapidly. Even outside of game development. Deliverables that would have elicited reverence from the business twelve months ago are completely unrecognized now.
> AI has destroyed the demand for something that can be produced in a few months.
Can you expand on this? I'm not sure how AI could destroy the demand here.
> Deliverables that would have elicited reverence from the business twelve months ago are completely unrecognized now.
Again, not sure how this relates to BioWare. Andromeda and Veilguard were both widely regarded as embarrassing failures and both of those were pre-AI. They hadn't released any titles in the AI age before dissolving.
> Perhaps enough indie game studios could align their thinking at the same time to accomplish a similar outcome. In any case, pooling of talent and resources is probably the only way to compete now.
Phantom Blade Zero just came out. It was made by S-Game, which apparently has fewer than 20 core staff members, though the game was worked on by around 200 people when you include contractors. It sold 4 million units in 3 days and is currently the #2 most played game on Steam.
Smaller game studios can do fine. They just need to make good games.
> I'm not sure how AI could destroy the demand here.
By overwhelming the supply. How can a consumer keep track of what to play anymore?
As an example, I didn't even hear about PBZ until you mentioned it just now. The fact that Valve might occasionally select lottery winners is separate from other forces involved. I would hesitate to highlight the occasional breakout (artificially-promoted) success as some kind of evidence that there is nothing to see here.
> They just need to make good games.
If only we could just do that.
> By overwhelming the supply. How can a consumer keep track of what to play anymore?
This was a problem pre-AI, too. There's more AI-generated slop at the bottom of the barrel but in general people were not discovering games by scrolling through every new release on Steam. And certainly they weren't doing that for anything with the budget of Andromeda or Veilguard.
> As an example, I didn't even hear about PBZ until you mentioned it just now.
I think this is on you more than anything, PBZ has been getting heavily hyped up and currently has 60k viewers on Twitch, early on a Monday in the US, which is pretty damn good. The existence or non-existence of AI games doesn't seem to be impacting anything here.
> the occasional breakout (artificially-promoted) success
All success in the entertainment is "artificially-promoted". Marketing exists for a reason.
Imho the strength of Indie games was being able to try ideas too risky to bet AAA budget on, or to target niche audiences deemed too small to make AAA profit
Neither of these is going away. The marketing strategy of teasing your game for months or years to build a fan base is going away. But if you life by "put up or shut up" I believe there is still room to win on vision alone.
If you don't have a unique enough vision (like most AAA, visions are risky) then I agree that you have to migrate up and just outspend everyone else