I refuse to believe they’re that stupid.
.....
As much as I think people are reluctant to admit, the people running these companies are much smarter than us
Oh, I don't think they're stupid either. I think they know exactly what they're doing, just their goals aren't necessarily aligned with those of the players. They're good at what they do, it's just that their primary goal is not "make the most enjoyable game for players within the budget given".
As far as people being smarter than us or not, you can really only speak for yourself there. They're just people. I've met plenty of people running companies who I wouldn't trust to make a sandwich. I can only judge them from what they do.
Companies like this don’t get big, and stay big for no reason. They know what they’re doing…. For maximum staying power over the long haul and maximum short term gain. For better and for worse.
There's a bit of a danger to assuming that just because a company is big or successful that whatever they do is good or well thought out. That's going to be reasonably true over the long term (although there are a few famous counter-examples of companies that essentially got and stayed big by being dodgy as ****) but any individual decision or product could be a mis-play.
The ability to not be destroyed by putting out the odd bad product is a lot of what separates a big company from a small one - they have sufficient resources and goodwill to weather the damage they inflict on themselves from the odd mis-step.
It's also not true that companies do what they do for both maximum staying power over the long haul (basically brand reputation and goodwill)
and maximum short term gain (basically immediate profit). These two things are not directly opposed, a good game returns both a good profit and significant goodwill. But there is enough tension between the two that you usually can't absolutely maximise both.
Goodwill could have been increased by making the game cheaper or including more content/features for the same price.
Profit could have been increased by making a cut-down game or including unpopular but lucrative systems like microtransactions.
People get paid a lot of money to find the correct balance between these things for the long and short term health of the company. As you say, they're smart people and they are professionals. But they're not always right, and it's unreasonable to expect them to be. Sometimes even smart people make bad decisions, because they had bad data, they were working from faulty assumptions, they had the wrong goals, or whatever.
GT7 isn't the trash fire that some would like to make it out to be, but nor is it widely beloved as the best Gran Turismo ever which I have to imagine is what Polyphony and Sony wanted. It's hard to imagine that the launch of GT7 has gone how they would have liked it to have gone. In some aspects at least, they have misjudged.
That is certainly able to be corrected and they can reach an appropriate balance of profit and goodwill, but as it stands I imagine that the people that made those decisions are looking back on them with the benefit of hindsight and trying to figure out what they missed. Understanding why they misjudged will be important to making the right calls to get the game and series back on track.
Not to mention, the current development of Gran Turismo 8 isn’t going to just pay for itself..
I kind of know what you mean, but this isn't generally how products work. GT8 should be built if Polyphony thinks that there's enough of a market for it to justify the costs incurred in building it. Profit from GT7 doesn't necessarily go into building the next game, and the proposal for GT8 should stand on it's own. They're not going to use profits from GT7 to build GT8 at a loss. At most it increases the available capital they have to run the studio for a period where there isn't significant income from game sales, but they still expect GT8 to recoup all that money spent and more.
So yeah, ultimately the development of GT8 is actually going to pay for itself. That's the point of making games. They pay for themselves and then some, and the "then some" is where the profit comes from.
I'm pretty sure you know this and it was just a throwaway comment that you didn't think through, but it's worth keeping in mind that GT8 isn't a justification for the monetisation model in GT7. GT7 pays for it's own development and makes it's own profit, just like GT8 will do when it's time comes.
Let’s focus on the matter at hand, shall we?
with microtransactions. I've bought the same car 2 times .
