Frustratingly, you can’t buy these things, they develop.Īs a games journalist, I have visited and written about hundreds of video game studios all over the world. It requires a combination of factors, including a shared vision, a work ethic, a supportive environment, a sense of identity and purpose, which emerge not out of funding, but out of creative relationships and trust. One inconvenient factor that seems to have been overlooked in both these cases is that, like a movie production team, or a sitcom writers’ room, or an orchestra, or a repertory theatre company, a games studio is a culture. You can’t just pour in money at one end and watch blockbusting games pop out the other.
What this has shown is that a game development studio isn’t something that can simply be built and operated through the combination of financial investment and a few big-name talent acquisitions. But should this have come as a surprise to a man who previously launched consoles at Microsoft and Sony? Possibly not. “Creating best-in-class games from the ground up takes many years and significant investment, and the cost is going up exponentially,” wrote Stadia GM and vice president Phil Harrison in his blog post explaining the company’s decision to focus on the platform rather than on game development.
Then came the news that Google would be closing its own game development studios in Los Angeles and Montreal, neither of which have yet produced a game for its Stadia streaming service. Bloomberg said they approached Amazon for a response, but a spokeswoman declined to comment or make Frazzini available for an interview. According to staff who spoke to Bloomberg, the studios also adopted a “bro culture” in which female staff were belittled and sidelined. The backstory as presented in the article is almost too predictable: Amazon trusted its game studios to a company veteran, Mike Frazzini, with no experience in game development, who greenlit expensive projects that chased already successful titles (a League of Legends clone called Nova, a Fortnite competitor named Intensity) and ended up being cancelled. Last week, Bloomberg published an eviscerating exposé on the dysfunctional culture at Amazon Game Studios, the development teams formed by the online retail giant, which have so far failed to produce a single hit title for PC or consoles, despite recruiting a wealth of industry veterans. I t was perhaps not the most surprising video game industry revelation of all time.
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