225. Reversing the Enshitification of Game Development

In hard times, it is easy to get discouraged. I'm not one to sugar coat. But here I would like to give my peers a Ray of Hope by explaining where we went wrong and point us back in the right direction

Making a Sandwich

I’m not much of a cook. I eat to live, not live to eat. For me making a sandwich might involve stabbing a tomato and putting a slice between two pieces of bread. My partner, who happens to be a professional cook, summons between 20 and 50 steps into her Terminator-like Heads Up Display (HUD) every time she steps into the kitchen.

Sometimes she asks me to help her cook something with her. Perhaps she hopes that she will inspire me to care about cooking. Then she looks at me. That look. I’m not sure if she’s crying, or laughing. Probably both. Doing anything in the kitchen ends up being stressful for me because I know I will never be that person for her. I will never aspire to the masterwork that is her cooking. And, other than to please her, why would I? It’s all going into my stomach anyways and I know it won’t look pretty after that.

Making and Riding a Masterwork Motorcycle

I’ve owned 14 motorcycles in my life, and I have the scars to prove it. I outlived all of them except one. I saw it sitting in an old man’s garage one day in the middle of the desert, with cobwebs and black widows adorning it. This was perhaps 1994. I bought it and fixed it up with the help of a friend who taught mechanics at the same school where I taught physical therapy and fitness occupations.

This was a 1975 BMW R90/6.

That’s a picture of one that’s for sale right now somewhere, in 2026. This bike was designed to be indestructible, easy to maintain, and to run at any altitude or conditions with minor adjustments. This bike could have had 10 owners before me. I rode the heck out of it. In a recent paper I mentioned that I had been run down by a heavily modified truck while crossing a bridge in what looked like an assassination attempt. I was on this bike at the time. The impact would have totalled any bike or car made today. I just had to replace a $10 mirror and it was good to go. I wasn’t as fortunate.

I had that bike until I was forced to sell it during the Great Recession in 2010. It was just as good as when I got it in 1994, and I put at least 80,000 miles on it. It would have been more but I had another bike (see below) for most of that time. I imagine it could have had another 10 owners since then and might still be on the road.

But this begs the question: Why would BMW do that? Why make a bike that runs forever? That sells for at least what you bought it at every handoff. Wouldn’t that make it harder to sell more bikes? That’s like making a Tinder that results in marriage on every swipe. Tinder would be out of business in no time.

The smart thing to do would be to make bikes that break down as soon as the warranty expires, if not sooner. The 1993 R1100RS that I bought in 1996 was exactly like this. It was 3 years old and was at the end of its 3 year warranty. And everything on it started to fail after I bought it. But it looked sexy while I was pushing it around.

This is the proper way to make money, right?

The Guru

When I was hired at Wargaming in 2013, it was on the same day at the company’s 15th anniversary party. That was one heck of a party, Russian fighter jets flying over the celebration so low that you could almost touch them. I used to have a picture of me sitting on a tank barrel with a fighter jet just meters above me. My boss told me the first day he met me that he would have hired me 7 years earlier if he knew I existed. That was a great feeling.

But the new technologies I had invented were untested and the founders were not sure what to do with me. So I sat in an expensive executive office for 3 months and did nothing. Finally me and my boss flew out to Los Angeles (from Austin) and met with one of the founders that had hired me. There was another person in that room, a personal friend of the CEO. I had been warned that he was problematic so my boss gave me permission to challenge him, but was afraid to do it himself.

The founder didn’t look good. Apparently there was concern he was terminally ill. [I talk about the importance of death as a motivator at the end of this paper] He had assembled us for a reason. The CEO friend described his vision for the company going forward. I gave a different vision and said that the other guy’s advice would kill the company. I figured it was 50/50 chance that would be my last day at WG. But the founder believed me, and asked me if I would go to Belarus (in the Winter). I told him I would go anywhere he wanted me to go, which was the right answer.

Now, I bet my faithful readers know how this was going to turn out. That other guy made it his life’s mission to get me fired. But I was given full authority over the Belarus project on arrival (World of Tanks Blitz) and it was a huge success. The design took me 11 weeks. Then I was sent to Saint Petersburg where I had authority shared with the founder on World of Warships. I argued for a major redesign, and they eventually agreed. I spent a total of 14 weeks there.

These successes bought me some time, and I was working like my life depended on success.

Blitz has earned over $1B USD, and WoWs has earned as much as $1.3B USD per year since it’s launch at the end of 2014. But it was time to pay the piper. The person I had crossed successfully eliminated my position in 2015. At that time I was overseeing 7 projects on 3 continents. He would get fired the next year once it became obvious that his claims that he could replace me were false.

When I heard that he was gone, I begged for my job back, but I had to talk to the new mobile director that was recruited from Machine Zone. Obviously we had two very different game dev ideologies. We had never met but he knew a lot about me. He said “Wargaming doesn’t need a Guru”. That was it.

I read that as “I really don’t want you in the kitchen with me while I’m making sandwiches”. The four projects I was working on when I left got cancelled and Wargaming stopped making new games.

Game Development at a Crossroads

As an economist I can see both sides of this coin. If you have a forever game like World of Warships then you don’t need someone to make another game for you. This one can keep the company going for 20+ years. Like my R90/6. If you have a studio with 400 people in it, then it makes sense to fire all of them once the project is completed, regardless if it bombs or is a huge hit. The game is made, what do you need those people for? It doesn’t matter if it’s a Concord or a Battlefield 6, that crew is going into the mulcher.

If it’s a big hit, you don’t need to make another game. If it’s a big failure, then you probably shouldn’t have made that game in the first place. All roads lead to game dev workers losing their jobs as soon as their project completes. But what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If your workers know they will be terminated at the end of the project, regardless of the merits of their work or the final product, and won’t share in any success, then why should they do anything other than the bare minimum?

The way I look at it, I want anything I work on to be amazing. I’m sure most people enter game dev with the same mindset. After a while it can be tough to maintain this outlook if it is not appreciated or rewarded. One of the most important traits in warfare or commercial production is morale. This scenario is not good for morale. Demoralized employees won’t go out of their way to make magic. No offense to Firewalk Studios, I can only imagine what caused their demoralization, but demoralized studios will keep making Concords.

Right now all across the industry trust is low, morale is low, and people don’t want to move to another city just to get laid off and stranded there. There is this massive disconnect between rank and file and leadership. Both sides are right, and neither side is wrong. That’s what makes this so hard.

What if the Studio Was the Product?

If 1 out of 10 products is a hit, and 9 out of 10 are failures, then that’s a massive roll of the dice. The odds for the developer are honestly pretty bad. This makes our industry super high risk for everyone including investors. As leadership, if you get the “hit”, you are one of the lucky ones and you can just go into maintenance mode for the next decade (if it’s a well designed Game as a Service). That’s the dream for leadership and investors, and that’s why they strongly favor making GaaS.

But I think the solution is staring right at us and we are missing it. There is something more valuable than the forever game here: It’s the studio that made the forever game. Assembling teams is expensive and time consuming. Moving top talent across the world is stressful. Making new relationships and building trust in a studio is expensive and time consuming.

So you have your shiny new hit and your company is set for a decade.

[Now I realize that if I’m right about the D2-Oxytocin Heterocomplex and dopamine down regulation, there will be almost no dopamine based forever games over the next decade, that’s a parallel conversation I’ve made in other articles. That only makes the argument I’m making here more important because next paradigm D2-Oxy delivery teams will be more expensive and complex to assemble.]

The team that made your hit is essentially a Unicorn Team. Other companies that are struggling would kill for a team like that. You might be glad, hoping a competitor goes out of business. But what if there was another way? What if you kept your team but rented it out to competitors?

You keep your team, it keeps getting more skilled and cohesive, and if your studio makes another hit then you get a cut. That’s even more passive income. Heck, your company and that other company using your studio might find reason to create a merger later on. There is a lot of upside here with very little risk, in an industry full of risk.

What I’m saying here is, if your studio bombs, sure disband it. But if your studio nails it, you are potentially just pissing away billions of dollars of potential revenue by disbanding it. Why would you do that? On a personal note, if you have a Guru or other top employee and you know it, but don’t need him or her for the next year, why not rent them out? You keep control over them, get more passive income, and get an even more experienced employee when they finish that project.

If you have a good relationship with that employee, they might very well like this. There are a lot of difficult personalities in game development and security is perhaps the most scarce and precious resource for any game dev employee. This is especially true for top talent.

Losing a job, income, and maybe even health insurance can be devastating for any game dev employee. The way projects spool up and down, there is a lot of friction between jobs. This is both stressful and financially difficult. They might be required to move, again. If they have a partner or family, then a lot of people might have to move.

As an industry we have to de-risk our systems. That includes how much risk we drop on our employees. I’ve been writing for decades now on how to de-risk the production and design chain. Now more than ever, we have to include employees in our supply chain considerations, as they are perhaps the most easy element to disrupt.

Now, I’m not naïve. I know what’s coming. AI is going to displace a lot of workers in our industry and others. Pretty soon it will just be top talent left and it will be even harder for younger new talent to break in. Having been a coach for 15 years and a teacher for 6 years, I know you can have a top talent perform poorly in one environment and be a rockstar in another. Once you nail a team formation, do your best to lock it in.

Leadership and team formation is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of our production planning. We think of ourselves as being “high tech” and that emphasis doesn’t encourage people with leadership skills and experience. Those skills come from people with intense team environments (like sports or military) and that means you might need to find those people in places outside of game dev. People with strong leadership skills know how to identify the different characteristics of team members and assemble them into winning combinations. Having access to those leadership skills can make or break your teams, just like in any other industry.

Inspiration

On a final note, I think it’s been a while since I reminded people to listen to this video of Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech. I listen to it at least once a year for the last 18 years. It isn’t inspirational by accident. He died six years after that speech of pancreatic cancer. He thought he was in the clear, but deep down you can tell he knew and he lived his life like he had to make each day count.