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> The strange part is that nearly all the decently large publishers seem to be completely unable to predict when a game will be successful, because they seem unable to determine when a game is actually fun to play. So they will dump hundreds of millions into a game that nobody wants to play, get close to zero sales, and end up shutting down the game, laying off the studio, and having to find another way to make back the $100m+ they just burned.

I know a guy who works with one of those publishers.

According to him, almost nobody at the publisher actually games. The ones who do, limit themselves to gacha games or Bejeweled-tier games. Gaming, at least at that one, is considered childish.

You dump the 100m first and then you get to see if its fun to play. That's a bit hyperbolic but especially for big games, they really don't come together until the end.

Now, normally you could use pedigree to make smart bets about who can make a game but there have been so many buy outs and shake ups that a lot of the AAA studios have been gutted. Who is a hit maker now?

I don't see why they'd care if the game is fun to play. They care about revenue, and surely stuffing a low-mid-tier game full of microtransactions works much better than selling a really good game.

Fair point.

> surely stuffing a low-mid-tier game full of microtransactions works much better than selling a really good game.

Do they? That doesn't seem like a guarantee. Battlefront 2 was the most high profile game in recent memory I can think of. An otherwise fun game that bombed so hard because of microtransactions EA had to remove all of them and basically gave up on developing it.