the biggest threat facing your team, whether you’re a game developer or a tech founder or a CEO, is not what you think

It went from a studio constantly making new, amazing things to a studio that just. Kept. Making. The Same. Things. And they started losing the experts who knew how to make things and started bringing in people whose job it was to simply make more of the thing

A common refrain in every failure, from Marvel to Warner Brothers to Boeing, was this: “Leadership doesn’t know what they want,” and “leadership doesn’t trust the people who know what they’re doing to do their jobs.” It’s a deadly combination — people who try to use easy data to justify making decisions when they don’t know the first thing about a product, because they’re too busy numberfucking and datafucking to try to make number bigger, results in every one of these companies getting worse.

The only people who can survive repeated failures are the people running platforms and stores. If you aren’t doing that — and it’s impossible for you or I to go into our garage and start a new Apple, because instead of competing with nobody for the personal computer or games console, we’re competing with the biggest, most stable companies in the world, with research and development fortunes that will smother us alive.