Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 dev Tim Willits explains why the game was able to achieve massive success when so many big budget games have failed lately.
Budgets follow revenue. Never the other way around.
Games got fat because they made more money. Publishers are the ones pushing for more and bigger and better, often to the point their expectations are flatly impossible, and then the studio gets demolished.
IMO that’s a leadership failure. Leading the company down the route where your games are “make or break” is a failure of leadership. I know there’s a power dynamic where the publisher has all the money and might not give it if you don’t do what they want, but that comes with the territory and if you can’t get the funding without being a yes-man then that’s also a failure of leadership.
Blaming subsidiaries that get wrung-out for their own wringing-out is looking straight at the problem and saying “it doesn’t look like anything to me.”
More directly:
Budgets follow revenue. Never the other way around.
Games got fat because they made more money. Publishers are the ones pushing for more and bigger and better, often to the point their expectations are flatly impossible, and then the studio gets demolished.
IMO that’s a leadership failure. Leading the company down the route where your games are “make or break” is a failure of leadership. I know there’s a power dynamic where the publisher has all the money and might not give it if you don’t do what they want, but that comes with the territory and if you can’t get the funding without being a yes-man then that’s also a failure of leadership.
Blaming subsidiaries that get wrung-out for their own wringing-out is looking straight at the problem and saying “it doesn’t look like anything to me.”