Why don't the people in charge of gaming like video games?

With everything that’s been happening in the video games industry over the last year I’ve seen a lot of people questioning whether those in charge know what they’re doing. Is Phil Spencer a failure? Is Sony asleep at the wheel? How does the guy in charge of Ubisoft think calling Skull And Bones a quadruple-A game is going to go down with ordinary gamers, that know that’s nonsense?

Gaming is such an amazing hobby, with so many incredible games that take dozens or hundreds of people to make. And yet usually all we hear from are the execs that don’t care what business they’re in. Was Bobby Kotick so desperate to stay at Activision for so long because of a love of gaming? Is whatever faceless bean counter is in charge of EA in the job because they want to push the boundaries of interactive art?

I don’t feel I need to answer that question. Although I doubt it’s very different in any other industry. After all, how many times do people complain about movies been ruined by meddling execs? That clearly happens all the time in games as well, but because gaming is so much more secretive, we never really get the details.

I’m sure at their interviews these execs all pretend to have enjoy video games, by which they mean they watched their nephew play Fortnite for five minutes once. I can also believe that someone like Phil Spencer is more into it, while still treating his own financial situation as far more important. But in reality, none of them really care about games. None of them are willing to sacrifice anything of theirs to make better games or consoles.

Compare that to the developers, the ones who actually make our games, and they sacrifice so much: their time, low wages, and now the constant threat of being made redundant, just to ensure a company makes a 96% profit instead of 95%. Developers work unpaid overtime, they give up time with their families, they exhaust themselves mentally… and all for what? To be sacked the second the game’s finished, whether it was a hit or not.

I’ve always found the head of Take-Two particularly bad, as he gloats about how much GTA makes and insists to his investors that GTA 6 is going to be the best game ever. Even though I’m sure he hasn’t the first clue what makes a video game good or not. All he knows is ‘number go up, number go down’ on his financial spreadsheet.

We see this absolute indifference to gaming itself in the way they’ve handled the current crisis. All the companies have been the same: lay off hundreds of people, cancel anything that’s not a sequel, and instantly ditch the games that have served you so well up to now in favour of live service games – which have a 1 in 100 chance of being successful, if they’re lucky.

But you know what? I’m not even sure about some of the people that are supposed to be developers. That Hermen Hulst guy that’s now joint in charge of PlayStation… the best game he’s ever been involved with is Horizon Zero Dawn, and I bet he thinks that’s god’s gift to gaming.

Or Neil Druckmann at Naughty Dog, who is promoted as this groundbreaking game creator. But the only thing that’s good about his games are the graphics and the story; in terms of being a video game they’ve very basic. The Last Of Us is to gameplay what Doom is to storytelling and it worries me that someone with such an extreme bias is in such a position of influence.

Consider Hideo Kojima too. Why does his Twitter profile say ‘70% of my body is made of movies’? If he likes movies so much, why isn’t he making them instead of games? Why is he always trying to turn games into the kind of entertainment he apparently prefers?

Some of these people may be talented by they are not good figureheads for the games industry and the kind of leaders I think having gaming’s best interests at heart. The mess we’re in at the moment kind of proves that. I’m sure it’ll never change but the bigger companies get, as they buy up more and more developers, the more middlemen and upper managers there are and the less control the actually creative people have over what they’re making for us.

By reader Trepsils