Colin Moriarty writes that he spoke extensively with someone who worked on Concord, an online Sony PlayStation game that flopped so badly last month it was shut down and all copies refunded within days of launch. According to his source, the game cost $400m to develop and market—which Wikipedia suggests makes it the most high-budget game ever—and at the heart of its problems was an internal culture of "toxic positivity" that made criticism impossible.
The segment is on Twitter, nine minutes long.
It was internally referred to as "The Future of PlayStation" with Star Wars-like potential, and a dev culture of "toxic positivity" halted any negative feedback.
There seems to be something odd at the heart of the business, a supergiant black hole where "project management" should be. That's not to say there are no credible, qualified managers. Just that it's project management that seems to fail in these systemic ways that end in crunch or catastrophe. It somehow ends up lubricant for greater gears rather than the leadership it's supposed to be—always in these stories are mysterious wormholes into executive suites, hairline cracks spreading down into the work, bizarre marketing cash fires. Is it the workplace culture that comes with big investments, with "enterprise resource planning" and all the other neoliberal things, getting snarled up with what it takes to make complex entertainment products? All that scoping and refactoring? Interesting that many of the most conspicuously unpleasant characters in online gamer culture are project managers who really want to be game designers or devs but never picked up the talent or the skills.
