Corporate Game Studios Can't Create Great

I’m sitting here in the early morning hours, coffee in hand, watching the newly dropped trailer for Disney’s upcoming animated feature, Hexed. Within thirty seconds, a profound sense of deja vu sets in. It’s a movie about... well, take your pick. The same awkward tween in the real world who suddenly discovers she actually belongs in a fantastical, magical alternate reality.

Of course it’s been done a thousand times. And the older you get, the more those repetitions start to feel less like a classic trope and more like a conveyor belt.

The aesthetic is what really stings. The character models and artwork look identical to the last twenty movies I’ve sat through with my nine-year-old daughter. The narrative arc is predictable, the emotional beats are telegraphed, and everything is frustratingly, agonizingly similar.

Why is this happening? Why has mainstream commercial art across film and gaming become a sea of beige?

Aside from sharing a linguistic coincidence with Ubisoft’s upcoming video game Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe, Disney and Microsoft actually share a much deeper, more insidious ecosystem. It is a world governed by overbearing, macro-corporate HR guides, boilerplate employee handbooks, and standard operating procedures. The creative spaces have been entirely infiltrated by a bureaucratic class of credentialed nobodies, people who don't have a single creative bone in their bodies, yet possess total authority over those who do.

We are seeing the consequences of this play out in real-time. On what seems to be the eve of Xbox off-loading a handful of development studios from underneath their massive corporate umbrella, this mother-henning, this corporate nanny state, is suffocating the creative space once again.

HR compliance manuals, procedural handbooks, and risk-mitigation checklists have become an ever-growing vine. They creep into every single corner of the studio until the atmosphere is entirely toxic to original thought. Everyone is terrified of their own shadow, and no one wants to be the person who risked a bold choice that didn't align with a corporate spreadsheet.

Think about someone like Jason Hand. He’s a veteran character designer and story artist who has been with Disney for nearly twenty years, now finally getting his shot to co-direct a feature film. Imagine how it feels to look back at what creative freedom looked like when he started in the 2000s versus the hyper-regulated gauntlet of today. Every single aspect of a character, from the shape of their eyes, to the silhouette of their clothes, down to a perfectly safe, focus-tested, androgynous name, is put under the microscope of corporate guidelines and vetted by third-party consulting firms.

The evidence isn't hidden; it’s right there on the surface. Look at the color palette used in the poster artwork for Hexed. Now, cross-reference it with the marketing for recent triple-A video game releases. Hell, look at the generic, corporate-minimalist aesthetic of recent Google Doodles for the World Cup. It’s all the exact same visual language.

Why do all modern movies look the same? Why are video games losing their distinct textures and identities? Look no further than the overburdened corporate bureaucracy.