Amazon, Google and why you can't just invent a blockbusting games developer

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Last week, Bloomberg published an eviscerating exposé on the dysfunctional culture at Amazon Game Studios, the development teams formed by the online retail giant, which have so far failed to produce a single hit title for PC or consoles, despite recruiting a wealth of industry veterans.

One inconvenient factor that seems to have been overlooked in both these cases is that, like a movie production team, or a sitcom writers’ room, or an orchestra, or a repertory theatre company, a games studio is a culture.

It requires a combination of factors, including a shared vision, a work ethic, a supportive environment, a sense of identity and purpose, which emerge not out of funding, but out of creative relationships and trust.

Blizzard, the creator of the Warcraft and Starcraft titles has a sprawling campus in Irvine, California that feels like a university, with its beautiful wood-panelled library, its statues, its many faculty buildings.

Media Molecule in Guildford, creator of charming handicraft titles LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway, feels like the modern approximation of Oliver Postgate’s animation studio – all singalongs and science nights and life drawing workshops.

It is almost too cliched, too on the nose, the way Amazon and Google went at it with their expensive test tube studios, the way they seem to have wanted to leverage Triple A game development in order to promote their other services and technologies – as though holistic business integration was ever enough to motivate great art or even decent entertainment.

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