Games

I like Phil more than Don Mattrick, but the real honest truth of why this is happening is a combination of factors that has made things terrible finally coming to a head.

The biggest long-term one is the fact that the game industry has leaned for too long on the fact that they would always have a new steady reliable crop of disposable eager young developers and has made being a game developer of any kind a completely untenable long-term career.

We have no “grizzled ancient” masters. At least not in the US or any Western dev house.

It is a completely horrible career. I dreamed as a kid of making games when I grew up. I went to grad-school for it and worked in it for only 5 years before being at a studio that closed only 2 years after we were making $8 million / day at our peak daily revenue.

After that, I found a job that paid 2x with zero crunch at a regular software company that I remained at until literally January this year.

Why would I go back to the far more unstable field of game dev when I have a family to take care of, and a mortgage I need to be able to pay reliably?

At this point, we have only maybe a handful of game dev studio heads that have been involved in designing games for more than a few years.

We have Ken Levine - who has changed studios multiple times. We have Joseph Staten - who did his best to push for the good parts of Halo Infinite. We have Cory Barlog - who made modern God of War and is still working for Sony Santa Monica for now. We have some good long-term indie devs, we have Insomniac and to a lesser extent Respawn (as Apex Legends seems to have become their only focus anymore) as game companies that are doing things pretty well practice-wise… and that’s about it.

Cliff Blezinski quit and got into investing. Neil Druckmann is focused more these days on the Last of Us TV show.

Everything else is either Valve - who doesn’t actually make games anymore - or a garbage company that is absolute shit. Our studios are mostly run by trend-chasing bean-counting executives like Bobby Kotick who never touched game dev from any place except a quarterly earnings perspective and looking at whatever type of game is making the most money that they can try to force their devs to poorly emulate and pivot whatever their current multi-year project is… more toward - regardless of what the game’s original design was.

This means nothing is being spear-headed by anyone who has learned to figure out what they’re doing.

Meanwhile, people like Shigeru Miyamoto has been making games at Nintendo for 4 decades at this point. The top guys at all the major Japanese studios (especially Nintendo) have become the masters when it comes to game design because they’ve literally done it all their lives.

As such, they know how to make fun games, and are a part of games studios now generally run by older people who have been making them for a long part of their lives.

TL;DR - the games industry in the West didn’t give a shit about retaining talent long-term - and as such is run only by bean counting trend-chasing MBAs and staffed by 20-somethings who are learning as they go, burning out, and then pivoting to general software when they decide to start a family.