Pulling focus: Must AAA pander to the distracted? | Opinion

Inflated AAA budgets have pushed studios to lean on focus groups and market research in late development, but these methods are deeply limited in usefulness. The real problem isn't executives who think they know game design better than developers, but those who think a room of random strangers does, and the loop of reworks and focus groups erodes both a game's originality and its developers' morale.