Is there trouble at the top in the video games industry? (pic: Metro.co.uk)
A reader is upset that despite the high quality of newly released games, the publishers funding them keep making obviously bad decisions.
Watching the PlayStation Showcase and Summer Game Fest the thing that strikes me most is that the people in charge of gaming must be morons. Maybe not every single one but certainly the majority. I can only imagine how many high level meetings, involving people being paid six-figure salaries, led to the PlayStation Showcase and yet it ended up being the worst thing Sony has done, in terms of damage to their reputation, all generation.
Summer Game Fest wasn’t nearly as bad, but it was pretty bland and boring and while the organisation and presentation was fine, I guess, it really had nothing to work with except whatever scraps publishers had thrown it. As if being featured on the biggest preview event of the seasons wasn’t going to be worth making the effort!
I couldn’t help laughing that the first thing to be shown was Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown, which was a long awaited return for the series and yet somehow managed to repeat mistakes that had already proven massively unpopular 20 years ago and where the main reason the series was in the doldrums to being with.
The way Ubisoft tried to turn the Prince into a unlikeable git, filled with ‘generic rage’ was a subject of ridicule for years – a meme before memes were even a thing. And yet what do they do with the big comeback game? Repeat the exact same mistake. And I’d bet anything it was Ubisoft too and not the developer, who surely would’ve understand the problem at both a basic level and in terms of how badly it went down with the previous games.
Time and again we see these absurd decisions. How many times have you heard someone question why a decision has been made, when any ordinary gamer could have told them it was a stupid idea? From PlayStation VR2 to pretty much anything Microsoft has done in the last three years, especially everything relating to Activision Blizzard.
The fact that so many people don’t understand the difference between publisher and developer may seem pedantic to some but it’s hugely important. So often I hear phrases like “lazy developer” or something to blame them for broken games at launch. It’s not the developers making the bad decisions it’s the money men, the publishers.
Developers are going to be just as upset to see all their good work ruined by making last minute decisions or suddenly rushing games out just to make a quick buck.
Not only do they want to make a good game because they’ve just spent three years or more working on it but they want to do it so their CV isn’t filled with flops and disasters. It makes no sense for them to cut corners or be ‘lazy.’
The problems in games are not all the hundreds of developers and their thousands of staff but a small handful of old geezers who control all the money. It increasingly feels like lions led by donkeys and yet the problem isn’t even acknowledged, let alone close to being solved.
It’s not developers who invented online passes, microtransactions, and NFTs, its publishers that told them to ruin their perfectly good games with them. I swear if the Xbox Games Showcase is filled with similarly dumb decisions I will despair because the quality of games at the moment is amazing, but the quality of strategic decision making is dreadful.
By reader Lotto
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A reader is upset that despite the high quality of newly released games, the publishers funding them keep making obviously bad decisions.