BF: Battlefield V #HG

Cronyism and nepotism are huge problems. The previous generation of leadership is reaching retirement age and began passing the torch over a year ago. How they selected the current generation is not clear but it isn't working at all. What features make it into the game or get development time isn't dependent on how they'll improve the game but on who has your back. This is especially troublesome because current leadership, or rather the couple of people at the top, is obsessed with executing their vision at the expense of everything else. Being a visionary isn't necessarily a bad thing but they have failed to inspire confidence in that vision. Instead, they did the exact opposite by forbidding negative criticism and discussion as their way of addressing low morale and skepticism. This, among leadership's other consistently backwards ideas and policies, just reduced morale more and more. The worst part was that it wasn't hard to see why their vision wouldn't work. Leadership was just stubborn and refused to back down or admit that they're wrong even after negative reception from nearly all parts of the process. Instead, leadership chased their vision even harder. Leadership’s drive to fulfill their vision despite objections from multiple departments and people was disheartening and they were also very sensitive to anyone who didn’t “get with the program.” People who agreed with leadership were pulled out of the production process and instead helped promote leadership’s vision in public-facing materials. They did this to steer player perception in their favor and then used “champion the players’ view” to enforce a sense of legitimacy. Implementation of features was then handed to team members that already had other tasks on their plate. Gallows humor has been used to cope with how painful playtests of leadership’s ideas were. Leadership loved to manipulate data when there were creative disagreements. They cherry picked a limited subset of feedback from social media channels that aligned with their vision and insisted that it was actually from the overwhelming majority. It’s easy for them to do this since players parroted leadership’s propaganda. It hurt to be sidelined in favor of half-baked suggestions from strangers that mostly piggybacked off leadership’s already absurd ideas. It hurt even more watching the points of failure people indicated actually lead to the exact disaster they warned leadership about. To top it off, leadership drew terrible conclusions on where mistakes were made and will undoubtedly repeat them again. Design had become an almost entirely top-down experience. The ideas leadership came up with were designated MVP to shut down criticism and to prevent resources from going to other systems. This made it difficult for everyone else to implement their designs and even then, leadership demanded revisions and would not discuss their reasoning beyond simply not liking a specific part, nor would they approve the design until those revisions were made. Their cronies did not have to undergo nearly as much scrutiny. Needless to say, these political games are not the kinds of games the company and its employees should be playing. Despite the protests from the people below them, leadership slammed their decisions through with near fanatical conviction. Unsurprisingly, these antics and the overall general lack of confidence have led to dozens of people leaving. Those vacancies will inevitably be filled by people loyal to leadership, regardless of competence. If current leadership is allowed to continue, then the company has no future. Leadership isn't fooling anyone by insisting everything is alright and that we are consistently destroying our competitors. That kind of delusion simply made people's self-preservation instinct stronger and increased their urgency to leave an obviously sinking ship. Everyone was painfully aware of leadership’s lack of project management skills. Because of leadership’s visionary nature, massive scope/feature creep and overcomplication of normally very simple systems were a regular occurrence. Leadership already bit off more than it could chew and chose to add even more work to the pile knowing we did not have time. The whole ordeal was reminiscent of “Pentagon Wars” especially with the people in charge getting promotions even after everything blew up in their face. Making another blockbuster hit like past titles isn’t completely out of reach, but leadership is going in the exact opposite direction. Wait a few years for the current leadership and their cronies to be promoted to positions of irrelevance then consider coming here. If the company survives that far into the future, maybe producing wildly successful games will become possible again.

Advice to Management

The current leadership is clearly not ready to lead. Just because you like another employee does not mean they should be seniors in roles they do not understand. Regardless of how much experience they have elsewhere, they need to be placed in roles they can perform. Be realistic about your plans. Massively increasing scope when we have already agreed on deadlines is a recipe for disaster. Scope creep kills projects and is something to avoid instead of something to practice. If you dismiss someone’s fears and it becomes a reality, you should probably take what they’re saying more seriously. Especially if it’s coming from more than one person. The previous generation being present and taking the hands-off approach is admirable but not working. Intervene before it's too late. Otherwise, current leadership’s drive to prove itself will spell certain disaster for everyone still here. Stop making overly idealistic assumptions about how our players actually play. There is a giant disconnect between the ideal leadership chases and how the game works out in the wild. Continuing to design games around some fantasy will only end in failure."