No experience in games, but I’ve seen first hand how a thick layer of ladder climbing middle management can create a culture where all important signaling mechanisms become internal, isolated from the outside world. In such a culture, what faceless hypothetical users[1] think slowly fades away, and what other “important people” within the org thinks is all that matters. Basically high school popularity contests – quite banal. However, the emerging behavior of such an organism can be very perplexing.

[1]: Dehumanizing the customer comes in different forms, I suspect. I’ve seen a lot of “we can’t care about individuals because we are web scale so we need to look at user metrics instead”. Perhaps in the gaming world there is more of “gamers are trolls and toxic boyroom loud minority, so their criticism isn’t worthy of attention”.