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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Games
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One of the biggest parts of the problem is that corporate management types can't quantify experience and skill. This leads to them thinking of projects purely in terms of man-hours, and they cannot comprehend that not all man-hours are equal. It's an issue that plagues a lot of industries.
Corporate management types are not organically recruited from experienced labour, they are from the "brahmin" echelons of society. Not only do they not understand that not all man hours are different, they have no clue of what is going on since they are recruited because of their pedigree and not competence.
For a prime example of this, look no further than EA's former CEO John Riccitiello, who keeps getting executive positions despite being objectively bad at his job.
He was hired as EA's COO (and later CEO) despite having zero experience in the video game industry (his prior work was at places like Pepsi and Clorox). EA under Riccitiello tried to squeeze every cent possible out of customers through aggressive microtransactions (he infamously stated in a stockholder meeting that he'd like to charge Battlefield players a dollar per reload), pushed to make every game always-online to prevent piracy (a decision that lead to the disastrous SimCity reboot, and the Sims 4 only escaped the same fate due to SimCity's dire reception [though it's theorized its vastly simplified gameplay compared to earlier Sims titles is a remnant of this time]), was a major proponent of the worst sorts of anti-consumer DRM such as SecuROM, and treated employees like trash leading to an exodus of talent. EA was voted the worst company in America twice during his tenure, and people online celebrated when the stock price plummeted and he was finally pushed out.
His post-EA career was also a disaster. After leaving EA (with a golden parachute, naturally), he was hired as the CEO of Unity Technologies - the company behind the Unity game engine - due to his "industry expertise". Over the next few years he ran the company into the ground with awful monetization strategies (he's the one behind the "runtime fee" fiasco, where Unity wanted to charge game developers by how many times their games were installed), wasted billions of dollars acquiring middleware vendors (mainly ad and analytics companies), and set engine development priorities that chased mobile game fads over what the actual users of their product wanted. He "resigned" when the stock price dropped by over 60% in a year due to his mistakes, and the engine's reputation hasn't come close to recovering from the damage his leadership caused.
I can't wait to see what company he ruins next.
I mean... if we want to talk about mismanagement, budgeting and delivery dates are barely a factor in game dev. With even a halfway decent publisher/stakeholder, the system of deliverables means that you tend to get into a case where the game is "done" by the time it was supposed to be and you are "just" focused on bugfixing and polishing. So you crunch until your staff are suicidal and then ship it and people criticize the "unfinished" area while loving the rest of it.
The bigger issue is that the entire industry is more or less run in a start-up mindset. The competent project managers are mostly ignored in favor of the rockstar devs. MBA who spent hundreds of hours firming up jira tasks and translating between gitlab issues and said tasks? Get bent you stupid stooge, you are trying to ruin games. In a quick video blurb because you worked on the foliage in one of the boss arenas? How would you like a dump truck of money to run your own studio?
And that is why we constantly see shit like Blizzard (when we actually look) where "locker room culture" is so prevalent and people just want to hire other people like them. They have no idea how to lead a project or deal with any kind of friction. But they are a genius Auteur until they crash and burn.