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And they completely ignored the fact that it's different, because those were the apprentices of the previous masters who did work on the previous games. They weren't just random people hired after a wave of firings to maximize profits. And now there are no masters left to teach the newest devs.

i'm genuinely curious why you took issue with that sentiment. it's been almost 15 years since steam greenlight and my library is 80% indies now, because... AAA games have been incredibly underwhelming for a very long time now.

its no coincidence that all the genres greats are the result of teams that shipped multiple games

That's what happens when you believe humans are replaceable widgets.

Life is so hard

The game is more of a happy side effect of a good team.

3. fans of the game, ip, or studio who will buy the next game and defend you online out of good faith. Or turn on you and boycott you if you fire your team (ie bit reactor)

I agree with you but team sizes are so large they don’t actually represent a team. In the Xbox 360 era, the studio I was working at had 80 people working on the title. It didn’t feel like a team. It was a team of teams. The teams need to be small enough to have that internal cohesion to be good.

Douglas Coupland's JPOD captured 2 well in the sense that they group bonded but management kept changing what they wanted the game to be (I think skateboarding turtle was in there at some point because the manager's kid was into those things) and over time folks just kinda move on.

💯

That's just math. It's like shopping at Sam's Club (high turnover, low common denominator) vs Costco (extensive experience, high common bar for performance). The difference in quality and speed is astounding. Happy teams make good stuff. Good stuff makes happy customers. Make teams happy.

Basically right, but please don't call a team "a product". Thinking and phrasing like this is part of the problem.

Resulting in seeing less of Western corporate studios...

Bonus points if just installing the game siphons valuable user data and sells it to a third party.

People have gotta learn that playing games made by people that respect them, their time and money is fantastic. I love playing games made by real people instead of soulless talentless hacks that give zero fucks about my feedback.

But, line goes up!

So is it going to be liquid games or solidus games?