I used to hate Electronic Arts, when they were the behemoth of the game industry. They had the most money, but they seemed absolutely the most unwilling to take chances. You can bet that was down to marketing. That’s why everything they did during a certain period seem to be a licensed project.
Activision neatly stepped in and usurped that title in my mind. They have managed to create, oversaturate, and kill several interesting genres. They are worse about buying and dissecting companies than EA ever was. Plus, Bobby Kottick seems to be an executive who cares nothing about how his company makes money. He’s down to the bottom line, and that’s OK for an executive, but it’s bad for the industry as a whole.
You’re only ever going to get a major studio release out of Activision. You’re never going to see smaller “passion projects.” So if they are following the Hollywood model they should have sub-studios that do interesting things which increase their cultural worth, not just their financial bottom line.
I feel a lot more sympathetic in recent years towards developers. Like, even if a game is absolutely putrid, it's not the fault of 99% of the people who worked on it and probably got crunched to shit. I'm happy whenever creatives can find some success, or are able to survive failure.
On the flipside I also kinda hate marketing more than ever.
This is largely correct in my experience. The team always wants to ship the best game possible, and good teams understand that it is a matter of scope and scale, and being realistic about how much manpower can be thrown efficiently at the game (add “in the remaining time,” if there is a schedule). This is always going to get down to looking at the dream feature set, and trimming it to what can be done well.
When I see these Kickstarters out there with upstart, new developers who put a shopping list of everything they’ve ever wanted in a game in their list of “what we are going to do,“ I know that they are going to fail spectacularly. This is also true of
kitchen sink projects like
NMS, which failed out of the gate, but have succeeded in the long term thanks to money hats.
When I’m on a development team and the client or unchecked Creative Director is adding features without adding time or manpower, I know it will fail in some way or another.