Sniper Elite CEO reckons Swen Vincke is right to snarl at short-sighted publishers: ‘You could argue that their business at senior level isn’t making games… their business is managing their shareholders’ perceptions’

It’s a grim time in the games industry, as layoffs and closures continue to decimate studio after studio. It’s an enraging thing, so enraging that none other than Larian CEO Swen Vincke took to The Game Awards stage last December to call out, well, everyone: “I’ve been fighting with publishers my entire life, and I keep on seeing the same mistakes, over and over and over. It’s always the quarterly profits. The only thing that matters is the numbers.”

It’s not just Vincke that’s been having that fight. When I sat down for a chat with Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley last week, he said the story was “very much” familiar to him too. “It cuts across every industry,” said Kingsley. “But I am aware a lot of my colleagues get frustrated from time to time by people who are potentially very good managers but aren’t specialists in the computer games area.

“There are horror stories of people having external producers saying, ‘Look, you just need to make fewer bugs, because then it’ll be faster to make.’ And everybody’s going ‘Yeah, you’re right, yeah. We really shouldn’t have decided to put 1,500 bugs in’.”

Fortunately for Kingsley and co, Rebellion is “isolated from it to a certain extent” because it self-funds, and does the heavy lifting of QA, design, and marketing by itself. But he agrees with Vincke’s point anyway, saying “all creative industries—films, TV—are to a certain extent impacted negatively by people that want quick results.”

Rebellion’s also isolated from the issue of short-term, shareholder-oriented thinking by the fact that it’s a private company without a board of investors to cater to. “In some ways, some of these big companies you could argue, and this is probably slightly controversial, but you could argue that their business at senior level isn’t making games… their business is managing their shareholders’ perceptions, so that their shares go up. And so making games is a sort of secondary consequence.”

Kingsley’s comments read to me as yet another cry against enshittification, that process by which digital products and services cease answering to the demands of their customers and start answering to the whims of their shareholders, implementing user-hostile features and policies that are good for a quick stock-market sugar rush but that end up driving away business in the long term.

It’s become a widespread target of user ire as once-useful services get buried beneath an avalanche of questionably useful AI features that please shareholders, or as our favourite studios get cut to the bone when they don’t meet astronomical sales targets.

Still, Kingsley doesn’t put all the blame on villainous shareholders: “I think possibly the games industry expanded a bit too fast during Covid. You know, we had really good times, and everybody was locked in and was playing computer games. And then the correction came, yeah, and that correction has been very rapid and sudden, and, you know, bloody awful, quite frankly.”