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this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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Something I've noticed from working in a big company is that people consistently fail to predict the backlash that their policy changes will cause.
They often don't even care all that much about the change, and if you point out that people will be upset, they agree that it's not worth it. They just can't relate to the people they are impacting.
Not every big company does this.
I work for a fortune 500. We had a "the customers are not going to be pleased" change get pushed to us, and a lot of internal backlash/pushback prevented it from happening.
A competitor then did the thing we stopped, and got reamed by the public hard enough to set the standard of "your a dumbass if you even think about this".
That's what I'm talking about though. The stupid changes usually get caught, but you still have someone there who thought it was a good idea.
That's the nature of collaborative problem solving though. I've proposed some dumb ideas before. I'm sure you have too. There's nothing wrong with stupid ideas being proposed. The issues arise when you either are surrounded by yes-men or are too forceful and ignore the advice of everyone else.
So... when it stops being collaboration?
edit: original post was in response to another comment. My bad.
Yeah, once it stops being collaborative, it becomes a problem. The original act of just proposing a stupid idea is fine, because it's collaborative, but as soon as one person (company,entity...) becomes too imposing to say no to, it's just bad times.
And more importantly, while the stupid change itself might have been caught it usually doesn't translate into a lesson not to listen to the person with the stupid idea next time.
The problem with this in the games industry is that usually those decisionmakers are the ones with the power, but aren't (or are barely into) games themselves.
The ones warning of backlash are often QA, and often don't get listened to. Then when the backlash inevitably happens it's all "we are sorry, we couldn't have known, all the feedback was positive".
I wouldn't say that it is a problem with the games industry but managers, sales & marketing people everywhere when they make bad decisions. Those kinds of jobs just attract very egocentric and self-serving people who don't know how to listen and try to shed blame whenever possible.
Oh for sure, I agree entirely.
I didn't say it is a problem with the games industry itself (actually there are probably more people in game dev invested in a game being good than say, those working in app development), but was just pointing out how it often manifests in the industry and makes it such a common occurrence.
To be fair, you only hear about a company failing to predict the backlash if there actually is big backlash. Who knows how many times have correctly predicted a lack of backlash when doing something shitty.