The Cult of MBAs ruins everything. Gaming is just where it's undeniable and unmistakable - because games are made of labor. There are no material inputs. There is no factory. Marketing is a factor for success, but it's not sufficient. Quite simply, people make games. They're collaborative art through engineering.

You can't buy a band and tell them they play jazz now. It might happen. It just won't work.

But for some goddamn reason, these money robots keep buying vibrant studios and sending them to the COD mines. First it's "sequel, sequel, sequel," until all joy has been crushed out of some once-novel franchise, then it's dull purgatory cranking out someone else's once-novel franchise. These bastards buy working groups of people like they're licensing a hit new toy. Frisbee! Cutout frisbee! Metal frisbee! Triangle frisbee? Okay I guess frisbees are over, next.

This miserable business model is the only thing that saved Crystal Dynamics from fifteen straight years of Tomb Raider.

This fraud-with-more-steps wallet-siphon has the empty suits frothing with excitement, in ways unseen since WoW exploded. Remember when everything tried to be an MMO? And 90% of them bombed instantly? Like, so hard and fast, the publishers would've been better-off burning the money for warmth? These fuckers don't. They don't remember when everything suddenly had to be a battle royale, either. They don't remember all the wallet-siphon games that bombed last year. They cannot imagine failures being relevant to their experience, because obviously they're all gonna be the biggest fish in the pond.

Rational greed looks like mobile trash. Those fuckers crank out a trend-chasing whatever, on the cheap and in a hurry, and if it takes off, then they'll spend real money. Usually by adding more waifus. The whole pay-to-waifu genre is... revealing. But this? This is embarrassing. This is billion-dollar incompetence. These specific people, theoretically raised from adolescence to manage large organizations, will throw out years of work and commit to cloning something they're already too late to ever compete with.

That's not even getting into how charging money inside a video game should be illegal.