The Death Of The AAA Empire

I read this article today. I think it does a better job than many, probably including myself, at capturing the problems of our modern industry.

We’ve got a problem in games, and that problem is not the players, it’s not that we don’t have great talent, and it’s not that games are dying. We’re not in the newspaper business.

Our problem is organizations that are out of touch. They are out of touch with players, out of touch with games, and I also think out of touch with each other internally. There’s an endless us vs them vs them between the devs and the C-level/Senior leadership and the publisher/investors.

Being out of touch leads to slow (and sometimes wrong) responses to changes within the system. We don’t do the right things, we don’t take risks in useful areas, because we can’t communicate within our organizations and as a result we don’t have a good picture of what’s happening.

Seriously, you want to know what’s going on in gaming? Go talk to people in QA. And by that I don’t mean your senior QA director or something, I mean the people who love playing games and accept a passion tax on their wages to be a part of the industry that brought them joy their whole life.

I’m not knocking the senior QA director as I say that, so if you are one don’t take offense. I’m just calling out the same thing the article did: over time, the people who have the power and influence to make giant calls don’t know what calls to make.

Many of our leaders are WILLING to make calls. They are capable, intelligent people. But they typically have no good way to assemble the varied perspectives required because our organizations have fractured and bloated and put layers and layers between the people who decide where the company goes, and the people who understand the terrain.

We end up chasing the wrong things, overconfident in our scientific analysis of what might work, and missing the core of what gamers are responding to. We make bets that are oversized for their risk profile, and find scapegoats when it blows up in our face.

We need to open the lines of communication. We need to start being humble, curious, and willing to learn from all the various people out there perfectly willing to tell us what they see. I’m not saying you just go do whatever everyone says and that will work out - that’s not the winning strategy here.

You go and ask, and then listen, to learn how others view the world and where they see the problems. That will inform your view of the world, and by extension what you prioritize, how you build your org. It will also provide you a feedback loop as decisions play out.

The question is, can we get our pride, ego, and experience out of the way long enough to take some real risks?

I hope so. Because if we don’t, the data and experience of so many people I know is pointing to the death of AAA in the west.

Our latest podcast episode talks a bit about this from a different angle: a former self-described “corpo” in the west saw the industry and decided the right move was to stop trying to make games in the US and Europe. He and his co-founders have spun up a team in China. And as someone who got to play an early closed version of what they’re building, I can say it is pretty awesome, and it got their way faster than you’d think.

Check out our conversation here: Why Eastern Game Dev Might Be The Future with Rob Wynne and Clark Kosene | #88

See you next time!