It's a grim time in the games industry, as layoffs and closures continue to decimate studio after studio. It's an enraging thing, so enraging that none other than Larian CEO Swen Vincke took to The Game Awards stage last December to call out, well, everyone: "I've been fighting with publishers my entire life, and I keep on seeing the same mistakes, over and over and over. It's always the quarterly profits. The only thing that matters is the numbers."
It's not just Vincke that's been having that fight. When I sat down for a chat with Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley last week, he said the story was "very much" familiar to him too. "It cuts across every industry," said Kingsley. "But I am aware a lot of my colleagues get frustrated from time to time by people who are potentially very good managers but aren't specialists in the computer games area.
Fortunately for Kingsley and co, Rebellion is "isolated from it to a certain extent" because it self-funds, and does the heavy lifting of QA, design, and marketing by itself. But he agrees with Vincke's point anyway, saying "all creative industries—films, TV—are to a certain extent impacted negatively by people that want quick results."
Rebellion's also isolated from the issue of short-term, shareholder-oriented thinking by the fact that it's a private company without a board of investors to cater to. "In some ways, some of these big companies you could argue, and this is probably slightly controversial, but you could argue that their business at senior level isn't making games… their business is managing their shareholders' perceptions, so that their shares go up. And so making games is a sort of secondary consequence."
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