BioWare co-founder: game execs "have never made a game" and don't get it (www.pcgamer.com)

46 points by entryleveljobsc •

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.

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.

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.

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.

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_.

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.

Hey, everybody (who matters) knows that an MBA can successfully manage any kind of firm; there is no field-specific knowledge required, nosirree.

MBAs are the best, Plato knew this

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?

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Wasn’t Phil Specter former head of Xbox a big part of the original Halo franchise?

I believe on of the responsibilities of C suite of executives was to put clarity on how the chicken is cook.

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