Monochron does have something though... (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, June 25, 2015, 16:11 (3438 days ago) @ Leviathan

... that is a little unique in the journalism side at least - which I just noticed when Monochron said:

If interviewers could stop attacking devs about pricing models that they likely have little influence over then reading their articles might become pleasant.

Compare that to comic book journalism, which isn't necessarily any better in general, but is a little different in this specific aspect. As in, I don't think I've ever read an article or interview with a writer or artist where the journalist throws them over the coals because Marvel or DC increased the price of their comic or the fact that there are ads in the middle of the art. It's just a known that the authors are in no way responsible for or even have a say in the stuff the big publishers do, so there's no point in grilling them about it.

This is a good point.

I think part of the blame comes from how little most people know about how the video game industry works. Even when I worked in it, many of the employees had confusing job titles that did not at all match their skillset, pay grade, or responsibilities. Take these two guys whom I worked with: Both were Associate Producers. One of them was responsible for setting up and installing every single dev kit in the building, he "hired" the interns, he fixed broken machines, and he assigned people to their workstations or offices. He was really functioning like a hybrid Producer / IT technician / Coordinator. The other guy with the Associate Producer had one job only: He bought and set up buffet lunches. That was it. He was our lunch lady. And these guys got the same title and credit in the games we worked on! This sort of job description confusion is commonplace in the industry (at least at the places I worked, such as EA and Activision). So you get in a habit of just asking people who seem authoritative, whether or not it's actually their job, and those people get in the habit of answering because they don't really know if that's something they're responsible for or not.

Now I'm going to say something crazy: Just like Cody knows he could make a better video game for $300M, I know I could run a company better than the way these major corps are doing it, at least in terms of efficiency, employee satisfaction, and product quality. I would certainly not be making the shareholders as happy (though I would pay quarterly dividends instead of only stockpiling my cash reserves... I'm looking at you, Apple). Since shareholders hire CEOs, well, that's why I don't run the place.