Quote:
Originally Posted by Merricat
I'm not demanding anything; I'm merely suggesting that any argument is more successful if it uses specific examples, rather than an abstract attack on an entire field of people. Your experience does sound dreadful, and while it is not the worst I've heard, I can understand why you are bitter. At the same time, I know that all kinds of reasons go into those peculiar decisions, but the bottom line for a publisher is profit. Without knowing specifically what caused the publisher to distrust the American division, I can only surmise that the publisher felt in some way more profitable by not investing in the division. That is infuriating, yes, and demoralizing as well, since presumably you want to work, but it isn't detrimental to their business or they wouldn't do it.
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Merricat,
It was predictably calamitous to their business. Fear and distrust drove their decision ("we don't want to make the same mistake twice"). In fact, those factors were so much a part of their decision that they didn't even trust THEMSELVES to tell a good game from a bad game at any point in development; they simply created a virtual rubber stamp that said "From America -- Cancelled" on it.
Almost ANY decision can be shown to be more profitable than its alternatives; that's a matter of presentation and statistics. And while many people in the industry honestly attempt to arrive at the most profitable decision, there are just as many people who make their decisions first (based on all the questionable criteria I've mentioned) and then selectively show why their decision is likely to be the most profitable one.
Example: an action game I worked on earlier this year (for one of the oldest videogame publishers and the young, exciting development company they hired). The developer had come up with a demo that blew the publisher away; they said "Make us this game" and assigned us a producer who was constantly lecturing us on how to make the game more profitable: which features not to invest time and money in, which features would review well and thus help drive sales, etcetera. Come to find out -- way too late in the development to remedy the situation -- that this producer had a rather elaborate agenda in which he represented to the publisher that we were going far astray (actually we wanted to stick to what had been presented in the demo; he didn't personally like the demo, so he had other plans for us) and that he'd "saved us and the project" by putting us "back on track," ostensibly making him the hero at our expense. It backfired; the publisher finally took a good look at the project, including the producer's emails and the game itself, and said, "Where in hell is the game you demo'd for us?", and the producer was sacked.
Sure, the producer thought doing the game his way would make the final product more profitable, but his overriding motive was increasing his own cachet within the company, and he wasn't competent to actually produce a good game. This kind of story is a dime a dozen in this industry, as you know.
There are certainly many bad management decisions that have affected me personally and which I've felt bitter about, but the vast majority just amuse me and lead me to shake my head with bewilderment. Nothing surprises me any more. I've simply come to realize that a company's decisions are frequently muddled, and frequently result in enormous waste of talent, work, and/or money. That's why I say that one should NEVER underestimate the ability of a publisher to seem arbitrary in its actions, and the bigger the company, the more likely the Peter Principle is to be operable there, resulting in even more questionable -- and sometimes incomprehensible -- decisions.
--Josh
