Jason Lissner @JLissner - Twitter Profile

I've been having a lot of conversations recently with people in the games industry, people who left studios, were affected by layoffs, or are trying to figure out where the industry goes from here. I think the western games industry has gotten itself into a serious funk, and one of the big reasons is simply that a lot of institutional knowledge was lost. Over the past decade or so, a lot of the old talent was either maneuvered out, burned out, pushed aside or simply left due to not believing in the road ahead anymore. At the same time, a lot of new people came in. And in principle, that's how it should work. Every generation eventually has to tip its hat, pass the baton and make room for new people with fresh ideas and new perspectives. The problem is that in a lot of cases, the baton wasn't really passed. It was dropped instead. Studios didn't carefully transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. They didn't preserve the institutional knowledge on how to actually ship great games. A lot of times, they just ripped off the bandaid and replaced a lot of experienced people with folks that don't have the scar tissue yet to make it through the worst of times. Imagine you need heart surgery. Which doctor would you rather have operating on you? The older surgeon who's performed that exact procedure a thousand times and knows every weird complication that can happen? Or the newer surgeon who's only done it a handful of times but assures you that everything should be fine? Personally, I'd pick the guy who's done it many times before. I think most people likely would? Experience really matters. Learning through repetition matters. Having personally solved the nasty edge cases matters. Knowing what goes wrong BEFORE it goes wrong matters. I'd argue that's especially true for games. There are a million tiny things that matter if you wanna ship a great game. Things you only really learn by shipping, failing, fixing, polishing, playtesting, cutting, rebuilding and so on. So if you've never personally encountered those problems, or at least been responsible for solving them, then in a lot of cases the lesson might not have stuck just yet. Since over the past decade, a lot of studios went through their own Ship of Theseus moment where their name stayed the same, the brand stayed the same and the IP stayed the same, but the people who initially put in their blood, sweat and tears to build the foundation are gone, we now have a real conundrum. A lot of these studios now need to re-learn how to become hitmakers (Which isn't guaranteed either since that heavily depends on who the people in charge are), but with development costs being so high now, publishers and investors are now effectively playing high-stakes poker with cards that often aren't really in their favor. And what happens if you notice that you can't win on that table? That's why I think this decade could end up looking a bit like the 70's in Hollywood, where the old model broke and ultimately couldn't be fixed from the inside anymore. All new blood from the 'outside' had to come in, folks who were self-taught, who already learned their lessons the hard way themselves before - and since they created films that resonated more strongly, they ultimately dropkicked their competition out of the race.

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