The Engineer Bias – and why Valve is doomed if they don't restructure
Kids are flocking to Epic not just because of the regular content updates, but because Epic has enough sense to realize that art, aesthetics, pop-culture, and theme are important.
There is an old saying in creative fields; you never want to make it before you have the skills to create in a consistent manner.
This happens most in the music industry, a band will stumble upon a sound purely by chance, then a song will go plat, but when it's time to create more "they just can't make anything as good as the first album."
Engineers, like average people, only have a couple killer ideas in them because creativity is a muscle that needs to be trained.
Fact is: engineers refuse to believe that creatives spent the same staggering amount of time honing their skills - because that means engineers possess about as much creativity as we do OOP skills.
As a private company, Epic was free to break hold of the incestuous lateral promotion cycle. Instead of promoting the guy who spent his entire life coding, they hired the guys who spent their entire lives working on art. A good designer needs to live and breathe art/culture. But again, with these skills you can't just backload them any easier than I can backload the skills needed to build engines.
I see Activision-valve in the decade if they don't make some pretty radical changes. They need to return to making genre games, and need to drop this "only the top of the top will do"
Imagine if music functioned like Valve . . . Nothing but 21 pilots, Imagine Dragons, Beeber, and Lil Yachty because they are at the top of the charts, and obviously the best, right?