People with MBA’s should not be allowed to run businesses!
Hard agree. MBA programs can teach legitimately helpful skills, but I think those with MBAs should have primarily advisory roles as businesses should be run collectively by their employees.
people with MBA’s are great a running businesses–
–into the ground.
Literally true of Boeing
Welcome to every industry under capitalism. The business/finance majors have it under control. They have no idea what it takes to make anything or what even makes the products/services valuable to others but they are positive it can be done cheaper.
You take a money bag, bury it, then three money bags sprout out of the ground. It’s simple economics.
Take2 seems to get it at the highest level, it is rare
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Applies to a lot of fields.
I have been in scenarios where business leaders doing their thing are frustrated by a competitor that has better product and better customer treatment (pricing, support, no superfluous subscriptions…)
Rather than adopt some of those business principles, they instead think that the competitors people are just betterexcept their leadership, that if they were in charge of the competitor company it would do way better, with good product and the better business practices like fucking up support, charging moore upfront, cutting employees, and hooking customers with subscriptions.
With many public companies, they have succeeded in convincing investors they are right and investors put them in charge.
Of course not, they’re goddamn MBA suits more interested in the bottom line and whatever earnings at the end of the day.
It’s like when Boeing had a non-engineer as CEO for the first time and then the planes started malfunctioning because the engineering sucked. An MBA only qualifies that people are capitalists.
Even wilder, their fate stemmed from taking over McDonnal Douglas. That company was in bad shape because of their shit business leadership. After being acquired by Boeing, they got put in charge because investors thought they would be better at the business side despite having just run a company into the ground.
This industry has taken a wrong turn and is now at an impasse.
We need to step back to when small teams of developers made lightweight games. It’s not like anybody’s got the RAM or GPU compute to run some of these newer titles anyway.
Developers, if you’re serious about making a game, take your ideas, leave the company you work for (before they let you go), and make it alone or with friends and close colleagues.
Let’s right this wrong. Let’s make affordable games that run on affordable hardware again.
Developers, if you’re serious about making a game, take your ideas, leave the company you work for (before they let you go), and make it alone or with friends and close colleagues.
People throw this line at devs every time there’s layoffs, and there are a lot lately, but the fact is there just isn’t funding out there right now. To bootstrap that project yourself and hope you make a profit, even with a really good game, is also a huge gamble.
And like, you gotta eat while you make it…
We can’t do that because we need health insurance.
What we really need is one big investor that can accept the publishing plan of:
Give 20-30 small teams budget to survive, some very basic planning assistance and help making contacts; then, go hands off and accept that about 15 of those games will die out. 5 will be good, and 1 will be a giant hit that pays for the others. Next round, the ratio gets better.
So do what Supergiant and Embark did? I agree with the sentiment: it is clear the main thing missing from games is the passion of the people making them. All the great games in the past were made by groups of people with a shared passion and vision, without overbearing corporate greed or executives watering down good ideas just in case they didn’t appeal to absolutely everybody.
However unless someone in that group has a rich relative, or they start early in life (see Arrowhead for example), the reality is it is hard to afford to live for years before finding out your dream project is a failure.
You know that small teams of developers already make lightweight games? A lot of them, in fact. The indie scene has never been better, in terms of production (the problem right now is discoverability, so the good ones rise over the bad ones, specially over the AI slop).
Many people compare the current times to the videogame crash of the '80s, but while the scenario for the AAA companies is similar, the AA and indie scene is a lot more healthier and would probably survive a AAA crash without major issues.
I agree with you and would promote more 80s style AA development. I think AAA has reached the end of the road
You going to personally fund these guys before they’re able to sell something like?
True, but imho the last great game BioWare made was Mass Effect 2. ~16 years ago.
I think in some ways a publisher can be good. Someone there to say hey we need a product we can sell and this is when we need it. But I also think there gets to a size of development team where it’s hard to make are because you just feel like a corporate drone and not a member of a team making something fun.
But the AAA games industry is full of overbearing publishers and absolutely gigantic teams with giant projects and giant budgets that cannot fail.
Smaller devs also can’t fail, not much anyway. But success was easier to reach because they didn’t have to make as much money. Now success means make all the money and that’s just fantasy. I guess you don’t make it rich if you make it easy to win.
He’s not wrong. But the same is true for BioWare in the last decade.
BioWare was meant to be commercially viable, but acted like they were a subsidized propaganda studio. They made games with way too big a budget for the existing target group and failed at wishing their buyers into existence. So they failed. That is a rare case of the market working like it is supposed to.
