How Google's Grand Plan to Make Its Own Games Fell Apart

The article mentions Amazon having the same trajectory but watching it unfold as reported by the gaming industry has been hilarious and sad. You have this tech behemoth that can and has thrown billions and recruited great people fail horribly because they haven't treated the domain with the respect and experience it requires.

You cannot simply order your minions to produce a billion dollar product in x years when dealing with entertainment. Almost every AAA game is created by studios/publishers with decades of experienced and even then the games don't always succeed (Cyberpunk 2077 comes to mind).

Thinking that you can go into a demanding and super competitive creative industry and make billions by treating games as another tech product is destined to fail. You need to play take the Sony or Microsoft route where you are both a publisher and several studios working over several years to change the video game landscape.

Google implements the million monkeys approach to recreating Shakespeare and watching it fail at scale provides interesting lessons, despite being sad for those sucked in and under.

A lot of game developers out there are working partially for free. These are people who want to work in the video game industry, and possibly even want to work for this particular company on a specific IP. Maybe they grew up with those games and have nostalgia. So they're willing to take a lower salary and work longer hours to live that dream. But most importantly, with that comes an attitude of shared ownership. You feel like you're not just a cog in the machine churning out another game in the series, you're bringing this franchise that you love to future generations. You have investment in the outcome. And the outcome is better due to you giving your input and opinions. I can't imagine a bunch of game devs gathered from various studios around the Ubiverse having any kind of shared vision like that. Plus they knew they were hired guns to make Stadia look good, and the future was uncertain. If Google wants to make games, they should come up with an IP (or buy them, as Microsoft and Sony do), grow it organically, and when people show up who want to work on it, hire them.