Playstation just lost 400 mil due to Toxic Positivity
On September 6th, two weeks after it was launched, Concord, the most expensive game in the history of Sony Playstation, the game that was supposed to be the “live service future of Playstation”, a game they internally thought had Star Wars like potential, a game that took 400 million dollars and 8 years to make, was shut down, taken off the market, and all who bought it were fully refunded.
For the 2 weeks it was live, the game was averaging 500 concurrent players worldwide and everybody was laughing at how bad it was. By way of comparison, the most popular games average 1 million+ concurrent players on any given day, more on weekends.
This is the fastest, most expensive, most complete and total failure ever in the gaming industry.
I’m not going to make a game review here, this is a leadership newsletter, so my question is the following:
How can such a large team, with multiple layers of oversight, all the way up to the CEO, work for so long, on such a high profile project, and not realize they are completely missing the expectations of their intended market?
How could so many, for so long, be so wrong?
Toxic Positivity, Ego and Groupthink
Joshua Robertson from thegamer.com reports that "You weren't allowed to say anything internally about this game - about how something's wrong with it, character designs are not right, and so on and so forth. They really truly believed. This was Hermen Hulst's baby, apparently."
Hermen Hulst is the CEO of Playstation.
Also, Ethan Gach, senior reporter at Kotaku, described the situation as “head in the sand mentality carried over from the studio’s Bungie roots. A sense the game would come together because the team was too good to fail.”
These are credible reports based on sources from inside the studio, but we don’t have all the details. I can’t say I’m 100% sure of what happened, but what I can say is that, based on the info we have, I see the same problems described by Irving Janis when he defined Groupthink, around the example of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion:
Top level sponsor pushing hard for the initiative to succeed (in the Bay of Pigs case, J.F. Kennedy, in this case, according to reports, the CEO)
An excessive bring me solutions, not problems culture develops, where slowly people become afraid to express concerns
A race of Performative Positivity ensues: people compete with each other to be the most positive, promise outcomes, minimize issues, because that’s what the bosses want to hear: good news.
And I would add a 4th:
People who can’t handle disagreement and criticism
Show me a team whose members are unwilling or unable to contradict each other, to debate each other, to constructively but directly criticize each other’s work, and I will show a failing team.
Sure, the other extreme is bad too, and when criticism start being used a tool to push down and dominate, that’s messed up as well.
But when there is no criticism at all, when people get into this “everything is ok, everyone is awesome, every job is a job well done” kind of mentality, that’s like drowning in honey. It’s sweet, but still suffocating.
How to avoid it in your team
Do not avoid delicate or unpleasant topics because you want to “maintain harmony”. Address issues directly.
People’s feelings need to be considered, but so does the success of the product. We can’t sacrifice what we’re doing for the sake of feelings.
Invest in developing the Emotional Intelligence and Communication skills of yourself and your team. This will allow you to be direct and supportive at the same time.