God Bless Mark Cerny

For someone whose name commands attention to speak up in favor of learning our craft and becoming more efficient -- God bless Mark Cerny.

I can halfway understand spending tens of millions of dollars on development of a game that will generate $1 billion in sales. On paper, the ROI is clearly amazing. But it's still the case that those tens of millions are being spent unwisely in so many ways.

There are organizations that are bogged down with middle management such that true development is slowed by the cooks/kitchen ratio. There are studios where experienced developers could be making great games twice as fast but they're held back by publisher-side decisions that stunt or even reverse the progress of iterative creativity. And then there's the rampant inability to mesh wise business decisions with the reality of the R&D nature of making something fun.

It's not as though the industry faces a dearth of examples to learn from. We just seem to have a top-down unwillingness to learn from them.