Business Heads Are Ruining Video Games – Cold Take

Business-heads are as much victims of the industrialization process as anyone else. Fresh out of college, working their way up, or the last man standing, the big boss eventually brings someone in with a fancy name tag made up of one noun and too many prefixes. Allow me to introduce you to the Senior Regional Head Co-Director Viceroy Manager of Finances or what have you. Their primary job is to assign everything a number and define it as a profit or a loss for the head honcho. The process is fairly straightforward in any standardized business from retail to industrial. Most of the time the bosses all ask the same questions. “How much money do I make? How much does this cost me to make it? How much money do I have once it’s all said and done? Where can I put that money back into the system to make more money?” People were surprised that Microsoft used mock reviews for Redfall. That they paid someone to give them a prediction of how well the game would do upon release, but that’s just a standard practice when you run a business with numbers. Phil Spencer was more surprised that they weren’t accurate.

A by-the-numbers approach is a stumbling block in the entertainment industry. As creators know, one day you may push out something that resonates with an audience and the next day you don’t move a single pulse. Maybe you hit a saturation point and people get sick of looking at ya–people are struggling to finish the last thing you put out and you’re still putting out more– or maybe you’re the fresh new something someone’s been looking for. You can look at YouTube as a micro-representation of the fields of chaos where strange flowers spring up from time to time and business-heads desperately try to give meaning through numbers. Then look out into the bigger industry. No one could have predicted the Fortnites and the Destinys, but of course more people want to produce their own Fortnites and Destinys. That’s one thing you can always rely on, mimicry after the fact. Once the numbers are a little more set in stone, then everybody once a piece. Perhaps you can assign a number to Vampire Survivors now, but what would you give it before it was produced? What about Grand Theft Auto before it was a big hit? You can tell me the costs, but the profits are too volatile to bother with bookkeeping. Thinking you can simply produce smiles with bar graphs is how you end up with Jeff Bezos, a man who made his billions from logistics–the shipping, receiving, and selling of products–, saying he’s discovered the 12-step fail-proof formula for iconic TV shows and then micromanaging his half a billion dollar production of The Rings of Power into a grand state of anemia.

The entertainment industry ain’t a warehouse where you can use past measurements and algorithms to forecast profits and losses. At best, a creator can be pleasantly surprised when they succeed, but CEOs don’t like surprises. Traditional industries live and die by their bookkeeping, so it’s on the business-head to minimize surprises. If the business grows tenfold but they can’t see it coming, they will lose their jobs. Even if great things are happening, what’s the point of a fortune teller that can’t read the future? Business-heads get paid too much to not know what’s gonna happen. They also get paid too much to not grow. That’s the second part of the job. They have to tweak the numbers to continue increasing the profits and decreasing the losses. And the most common way to increase money in a factory is to increase production. In my case, I was working with giant equipment with numerous knobs that directly responded to my every whim. Increase the speed of the blades. Change the temperature. Increase the rate of plastic going into the machine. Hire more people to keep the pelletizer running 24/7. I doubled production and directly doubled the money flow. The CEO told me to triple production, but it didn’t triple the money flow because we oversaturated our own market.

You see that all over the place in video games. See through the eyes of a business-head. Look at Microsoft’s recent acquisitions. Spend more money to produce more content at a pace that your competitors can’t keep up with. I pick on Assassin’s Creed because it is the shining example of trying to manufacture creative lightning in a bottle. What was originally meant to be a trilogy, continued even after the original creator, Patrice Désilets, bowed out, saw two major releases in 2014, and had to take a break in 2016–but still released three spin-offs because we can’t completely disappear from the public, they might break up with us.– before they finally decided it was time to pump the brakes on the Assassin’s Creed assembly line. It makes sense for Halo, Call of Duty, and Battlefield to try and outpace each other in the First Person Shooter genre, but who was chasing after Assassin’s Creed that they felt they had to sprint away from so desperately?  It seems video game companies forget that overzealous spending and oversaturation is what nearly killed video games in 1983.

Once the offset supply-and-demand reckoning hits is when the poor little business-head is forced to pull out the scissors. All of that increased production is spewing out costs, so the excess needs to be trimmed back. Features are slashed. Side studios go under. People lose their jobs. The CEOs demand the business-heads cut costs based purely on numbers again. Find what costs the most money, cut it off, and pray that it wasn’t vaguely important. This is the most dangerous step in the video game industry because if you don’t have a number to justify your worth you will not be spared. Think like a business-head and it makes more sense why Konami started angling towards the mobile gaming market and parted ways with Kojima, the auteur behind Metal Gear Solid. There is no pen-to-paper number you can assign a Chief Content Officer known for perfectionism and big-budget productions. Here’s an employee that uses the company credit card to pay for music he never ends up using in his game. It’s enough to give middle management conniptions.

The cost cutting continues and we find it strange that games seem to come out a little buggier nowadays.  Crucial jobs like QA turn into revolving doors for the industry starting at the lowest pay possible. It’s why businesses are trying to court AI in the tech space and it’s leaking into everything. Business-heads aren’t giving AI the side-eye because it’s numerically better than humans. It’s numerically and undoubtedly cheaper than humans–even when taking into account all the copyright infringement lawsuits. Machines don’t need to stop for a lunch break or a potty break. They don’t need have to sleep and you don’t have to pay them overtime, health insurance, or residuals. Writer’s don’t go on strike so they can afford yachts. They strike to validate their own value, but alas if they aren’t talking tangible numbers then business-heads don’t speak it.

Then we get to the last step, aggressive monetization. It tends to take customers by surprise who weren’t paying attention to the production increase and then the cost cutting. Frankly, it’s embarrassing to see a company walk back all of their low prices and fun perks because they realized a little too late that it wasn’t sustainable– while also announcing record breaking profits… Microsoft, 2k, Sega, Sony, Nintendo, so many publishers have to raise the prices of their premium games. Yeah, sure why not? The economy happens but Xbox Game Pass is also seeing an increase because they’re trying to make money out of whoever is still around waiting for them to come up with a hit. As much as I hoped and dreamed that Microsoft would use all of those acquired studios to make great games, it was painfully obvious that they were angling to muscle out Sony. The longer the Activision-Blizzard acquisition stalls out in court the more those bought out studios are going to accrue losses. Microsoft will have to start selling off their purchases for scrap.

And as the year passes by, I see more oddities come about like EA’s decision to split into EA Sports and EA Entertainment and I wonder if these are decisions made for quality assurance or if it’s just business. My guess is it’s some kind of tax write off. There is money to be made in failing products, but that’s another talk for another time. Meanwhile Nintendo does the opposite and runs their business around the quality of their games. They sue everyone to protect their product and their image. They bowed out of the graphics arms race and focused on their own identity. Valve leaned into the publisher space and provided a more consumer friendly platform that promotes smaller titles as much as the triple-A. Quality comes first and the money will follow. That’s the way this industry needs to operate, unless it wants to start digging more holes in landfills for the inevitable sequel to E.T.: The Video Game.