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.

People with MBA's should not be allowed to run businesses!

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.

This is why if you fuck with the free market, monopolies will destroy everything. The natural progression of capitalism. In high school, I was taught this is why we have anti trust protection. Anybody got any more of that? No? Industry will continue to fall until all that is left is musk and his army of equity firms.

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.

Zeschuk nails it, and it lines up with something Nate Hagens talked about on The Great Simplification: a company doesn’t need a single villain at the top to behave like a psychopath, it just needs to be structured so that extraction beats CRAFT every time. That’s what “none of these people have ever made a game” feels like to me. BioWare was built on people who loved the work and took the time it needed; the PIF/private-equity model wants annual sports titles and predictable margins. Hagens’ talks about traits out-competing values, so the people with the values (Zeschuk) walk away from the crucible and the people with the extraction reflex keep hammering forward. We ALL have this SAME problem people.. wtf are we going to do about it is the question.

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.

True, but imho the last great game BioWare made was Mass Effect 2. ~16 years ago.

It's really not that hard to see why these executives are placed in their positions for. We've been seeing it in practice for a few decades now. Everything he's saying is nothing we hadn't heard before either.

MBAs will ruin the planet

well d'uh. they are only interested in making tons of money. indie game developers are what replaced the game devs of old times. many AAA games are soulless pieces of shits.

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.

Bioware has been on a downward trajectory ever since they sold to EA.

Look at how much worse Mass Effect 2 was than 1. They turned a crpg into an action shooter for mainstream appeal. Simplified the class system and ruined the lore with those absurd heat clips. ME was great because of its deep sci-fi lore approach but the lore came second to EA's corporate profits and their ideas about what kind of gamer wants to see Tali'zorah's boobs. (Hint: it's actually the sapphic engineering nerds)

In recent years, we got Andromeda and Anthem. Bioware has been a shuffling zombie of itself for a decade.

Bring back the mineral scanning and let us have a four way with Tali, Garrus, and Legion! (the only good part of ME 2)

Oh by the way I'd just like to add that Dragon Age Origins was underwhelming and I lost interest right after beating the second area. I think they leaned too much into WOW-style combat. KOTOR had better medieval combat and it's a Star Wars game.

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