I'll add, though, that I don't necessarily disagree with the premise of this article: maybe the portion of people passionate about game development (and software in general) has become a lot lower, so now leadership is more likely to be people just looking to maximize income, power, and success, rather than people who want to make the best possible products, or at least work on projects that they are passionate about.

But I did want to agree with the person I originally replied to: just because someone is from a highly technical background and doesn't seem like some MBA looking to maximize profits, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll make good decisions.

I am really interested in hearing ideas for how to optimize for the kind of behaviour we want, without encouraging bad behaviour that simply optimizes around whatever incentives exist, sacrificing things that are not always obvious to the consumer.

Like if it turns out that the best way to get quality games was to actually promote people passionate about game development into management... how do you catch people who fake it? Or prevent people who may absolutely love developing games from ending up in development hell and never focusing on prioritizing a usable game, cutting corners where necessary, or possibly only working on the fun parts (e.g. Star Citizen? Or most projects I start for fun :( ... )

It is discouraging that the current system... having people review games and just choose not to buy shitty ones clearly doesn't work, given the state of AAA games right now. And to some extent I feel like this can be applied to democracy and the economy as a whole: the wrong things are being optimized for, to the detriment of important things that are harder to measure objectively.

There are some success stories though, I absolutely love Factorio and its recent expansion. And I think there are lots of other great indie games. Maybe there is nothing to complain about in game development, at least, where supposedly the indie game options are better than ever. Perhaps this post is not a great place to ask this kind of question, but I honestly don't know where it would be more applicable. I feel like political or economic discussions on the internet (and especially Lemmy) get way too polarized.

Is he actually good at it or are guys who want to hang out with a billionaire saying he's good at it?

The huge majority of indie games never make any money at all. This link is a little older, but it claims that 50% of indie games on steam never make more than $4000, only 25% ever make more than $26 000 and only 14% cross the $100k mark.

Considering the cost of developers, that's about 1-2 man years for the $100k mark, and then there's only a 14% chance of even recouping that.

Passion projects work out because the people making them don't value their time as work time, don't make a salary from it, and even then in the huge majority of cases, it doesn't work out financially.

Imagine having 10k employees and not setting aside an indie dev team or two for passion projects.

This statement holds true for pretty much every other corporation. Imagine owning a huge farm and not setting aside a few farm hands to grow old artisan vegetables. Imagine owning a supermarket chain and not setting aside a few shops for exotic sweets from Central Africa. Imagine owning a fast food chain and not setting aside a few restaurants for artisan burger variations.

Yes, every corporation could afford to do stuff like that, but they aren't there to advance humanity by investing in arts and crafts, but for making every last drop of money they can. And yes, there's much to criticise about this goal, but making little indie passion projects doesn't work well with corporations.