Sony president reflects on why Concord failed : PS5

Problem with these games is you need a single genius in charge of creativity. Rockstar has Dan Houser. Bethesda has Todd Howard. There was Ken Levine before he went off and went crazy. Those incel 90s FPS inventors. Etc etc.

Millennials and Xooners have, what, a handful of indie devs? Cave Story, Fez, Braid, Binding of Isaac, Zachtronic games, Minecraft, Undertale, etc etc. All the best games lately (that aren't from Japan) are made by extremely small teams or by just one guy. And it seems whenever a AAA studio tries to bring someone in and get real game direction, it always gets bowlderized by focus groups and market researchers.

Meanwhile, GTA continues to make trillions, and their formula appears to be to finance interesting ideas, and being a vision to life. Total MBA Death. Behead MBAs. Roundhouse kick etc etc.

However, to be fair even if someone had been brave enough to call out how bad the game was, their only reward would have been getting fired for questioning three direction of development.

There were probably plenty of junior employees who knew what they were making was a giant, steaming pile of shit. But when your concerns are dismissed every time by the higher-ups as 'not being a team player' then you stop bothering and just sit back to watch the whole thing inevitably slide into the ocean.

My understanding is that everyone who worked on the game got fired, but the executives who greenlit it and made the poor financial decisions were promoted or otherwise benefited.

It's also the comically bad solution.

The root cause, aside from all the "woke" culture war shit, was that the game came out too late. It spent far too long in development. All his remedies will involve bloating the budget and timeline even further. It's the opposite of a solution and will literally make future games even worse.

If you're going to chase current trends, you need to be snappy. If you're going to spend a long time (over 3 years) making a game, it needs to either be an already established franchise or it needs to bring something new to the table, preferably the latter.