Poor leadership slows down game development

gamedeveloper.com

19 points·flail··4 comments

I’d like to see a study on how incompetent tech leads get and maintain their high paying jobs. The poor leadership traits described are the bare minimum competencies I’d think.

There's Peter's Principle that says that everyone will be promoted till they eventually become incompetent at their job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

And then, gamedev isn't known for their progressive approach to management (to say the least). A couple of years back, it made the major news in Poland that CD Projekt RED adopted Agile. They actually pumped PR efforts in that.

In 2023.

Give them two more decades, and they might as well adopt modern management approaches or even Lean Startup.

I would speculate that a relatively high degree of incompetence of leadership in gamedev is a combination of Peter's Principle and the fact that it's an industry romanticized by many. Thus, they can afford not to fix many issues that would be fatal for an average boring corporation. There will always be new blood coming.

I have friends in the games industry. Stunningly bad and arrogant leadership seems to be the norm.

Make a random dude (it is usually a dude) a manager in a games company and suddenly he thinks he is a brilliant game designer with all the right answers overruling more experienced people.

Until the game flops and he is fired (or not if a good friend of the CEO).

Rince and repeat until bankruptcy.

This is just an article about bad leadership, with game dev as the given example.

These things are universal, and I assume must be taught. You couldn’t arrive at the same output so pervasively by chance.

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