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The most profitable franchises in core gaming (FIFA, GTA) were made as profitable as they are by an Australian grifter with no real tech skills (Andrew Wilson) beyond html (they hired him because he was a jock, unironically it’s on Wikipedia) and the Houser brothers, who were two London rich kids with no technical skills who started a music label.
What happens when you don’t have the MBAs? You get SAP, run by German autists who missed out on 30 years of technical progress. Epic would be toast right now if they didn’t get lucky with Fortnite, they only had the money to pivot unreal into film because of it.
It's not so much that non-tech people are bad for games. But that their utter dominance means tech nerds rarely get their voices out.
When doctors & lawyers take on secondary leadership roles, they don't turn into narrow minded autists. They learn the ropes of their new role, and apply those to their profession. Tech people should be able to do this too.
A company must have at least one of - love for the product, love for the tech or love for the user's identity. The counter to that is love for the money, love for the optics & love for the media. The nerds are most likely to have love for the tech, love for the user (because they're gamers themselves) and love for the product (because they want to make good games).
MBA types usually love the latter. But, media, optics and money are downstream from success. You can game media + optics and temporarily identify a money extraction strategy. If the MBAs don't play the games, don't care about the tech and don't identify as a the user (a gamer), then they'll inevitably crash and burn. In the woke era, many video game art-people hated gamers & gaming, and were using it as a way to tell their own woke story. This doesn't work. GTA was the Housers' baby. They may not write code, but they surely loved the product.
Wilson definitely revolutionized the monetization of gaming as EA CEO. It's not to say that people like him shouldn't be hired or given important roles. But the CEO is the lifeblood of a company. Give bean counters the reigns, and they destroy the whole company for better quarterly results. Ballmer is the classic example.
The counter to this is Google and Facebook. Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg turned them into the world's richest companies. But, because the CEOs were technical, the focus of the company remained technical. Even Tim Cook's peak MBA personality (in the best way possible) was balanced by Ive & Craig as two people who loved the product. It's cliche to say you need a balance. But, you need a balance. For instance, look at the EA board. 2/11 people have technical backgrounds (2 CTOs). One of them is a forever program manager without game-dev experience and another is a head of security, who while technical, has nothing to do with game development. This is the lopsidedness I'm talking about. 0/11 people are hard core game dudes.
I guess I'm in the Bay Area where technical people are fiercely business focused. I can't relate to the SAP situation
Say what you want about Elon, but he quickly reaches a 201 level technical knowledge in the companies he runs. Your CEO doesn't need to be an expert. But they need to be good enough to smell bullshit when it stares them in the face. Listen to Elon's reasoning about major strategic decisions. It is simple first principles reasoning on top of the core technical primitives of his company. (and I don't even like the guy).
How much of a bean counter was Ballmer, really? I truly believed he loved Microsoft, probably even more than Bill.
Their respective portfolios certainly seem to imply so
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