I was once part of a company that got bought out. The new owners did what new owners often do — looked for ways to trim costs, pushed out anyone approaching retirement age, declined to renew contracts for people who asked for what they’d already been promised. Efficient, on paper. Sensible, probably, from a certain kind of spreadsheet perspective.
What happened next was less efficient. The clients stopped coming back. The industry contacts that had taken years to build quietly redirected their work elsewhere. The network of relationships that had made the company worth buying in the first place — the reason anyone picked up the phone when that company called — walked out with the people who had built it. The buyers had purchased the legal entity, the brand, the infrastructure. What they hadn’t purchased was the thing that actually made it work. A year or two later the company was a shell. Not long after that it wasn’t anything at all.
They thought they were buying a company. What they were actually buying was a team. And when the team left, there was nothing left to buy.
The games industry makes this mistake at scale, and with remarkable consistency.
The Prestige Of The Companies They Used To Work For
Jason Schreier, reporting for Bloomberg, recently covered the story of Lightspeed LA — a studio founded by a former head of a Rockstar subsidiary, funded by Tencent with hundreds of millions of dollars, and tasked with building a Grand Theft Auto competitor. Six years later, after a playtest where reactions were described as almost unanimously negative, the studio was shut down and the game was cancelled.
Schreier’s reporting identifies something worth paying attention to. He describes a pattern where outside investment — whether from large conglomerates, venture capital, or private equity — flows toward people based on what he calls “the prestige of the companies that they used to work for.” Studios founded this way, he notes, have largely either failed to ship anything, shut down, or released something that didn’t reach players or meet expectations. The results, in his words, have been pretty catastrophic.
It’s a damning pattern. But I think the most important question about it isn’t being asked loudly enough.
Who Actually Made The Games
If you look at the credits of almost any major AAA game, you’ll find hundreds of names. Sometimes thousands. Associate Producer. Senior Narrative Designer. Lead Environment Artist. Technical Director. The titles are specific, the roles are real, and the contributions behind them are genuine. But as a signal of individual achievement — as a way of understanding what any one person actually did and how much of the final product they’re responsible for — game credits are almost meaninglessly vague.
This isn’t an accusation. It’s a structural problem. The game industry has never developed a reliable way to communicate individual contribution on a shipped title, partly because the nature of collaborative creative work makes that genuinely difficult, and partly because nobody has had much incentive to try. A shipped AAA game on your resume looks good regardless of what you actually did on it. A prestigious studio name in your history opens doors. And a director or executive title on a landmark game can, apparently, open a lot more than doors.
It can open a checkbook.
When a landmark game ships — when a Rockstar title or a Naughty Dog title or a Blizzard title becomes the thing that defines a generation of players — credit flows upward. It attaches to names. To directors. To studio heads. To the people whose faces appear in the documentary and whose quotes end up in the press coverage. That’s how the industry tells the story of how games get made.
But those games were made by teams. Hundreds of people, sometimes thousands, working across years to build something that no individual could have built alone. The world design, the systems, the narrative, the audio, the art, the engineering, the QA — all of it the product of specific people with specific skills working in a specific environment with specific resources and specific institutional knowledge built up over years. Not to mention all the things those people provided that happened to fall outside of what their title prescribes.
When an executive or director leaves that environment and starts something new, what transfers? Their experience transfers. Their taste, their relationships, their understanding of how certain problems get solved — some of that transfers. But the team doesn’t transfer. The infrastructure doesn’t transfer. The institutional knowledge built into the people around them doesn’t transfer. The specific alchemy of that specific group of people at that specific moment in time does not transfer.
A person who was part of something great is not the same thing as the reason it was great. And they are certainly not a portable, replicable source of that greatness.
The Legibility Problem
So why does the investment keep flowing anyway? Why do publishers, venture capitalists, and — perhaps most troublingly — crowdfunders keep writing checks based on a premise that the evidence keeps disproving?
Because a name is legible in a way that a team isn’t.
You can put a name on a pitch deck. You can point to a credit and say this person was there when that game shipped, and the person across the table understands what that means — or thinks they do. What you can’t put on a pitch deck is the 300 people whose collective judgment, taste, skill, and institutional knowledge actually made the game what it was. You can’t pitch a team that doesn’t exist yet. You can’t promise to reassemble something that was never really one person’s to assemble in the first place.
Crowdfunding makes this even more pointed. At least a publisher or a venture capital firm has some institutional process for evaluating what they’re investing in, however flawed it may be. Crowdfunding puts individual fans — people who loved a game and want to believe in the person they associate with it — in the position of betting their own money on the same myth. With even less information. And even less recourse when it doesn’t pan out.
The myth is the same at every level. The name is the game. Except the name was never the game.
What The Team Was Worth
The people who actually built those landmark titles — the ones whose names appear in the middle of the credits in a font two sizes smaller than a director’s — are still out there. Many of them are still making games. They carried the institutional knowledge, the craft, the problem-solving capability that made those projects what they were. And in most cases, nobody is writing them a check with six zeros on it based on their contribution.
This isn’t just an investment problem. The same logic that leads a Tencent to fund a studio on the strength of one person’s resume shows up in hiring decisions at every level of the industry. Credits get used as proxies for competence in ways that don’t hold up under scrutiny, and the people who know how to position their credits well tend to advance faster than the people who simply did the work. That’s a different conversation — and one worth having properly another time.
But the starting point is this: the team is the asset. It always was. The industry’s habit of crediting individuals for collective achievement doesn’t just distort the historical record — it distorts where the money goes, who gets hired, and what gets built next. And the people who pay the steepest price for that distortion are almost never the ones whose names were on the pitch deck.