"What's wrong with this country, Marty? Money. You taught me that. Evil defense contractors had it, noble causes did not. Politicians are bought and sold like so much chattle — our problems multiply. Pollution, crime, drugs, poverty, disease, hunger, despair — we throw GOBS of money at them... Problems only get worse. Why is that? Because money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it." –Cosmo

No matter how many times I watch Cosmo and Martin's awkward little reunion, I always come away feeling a little cheated. I mean, there they are – separated by a prison sentence and decades on the run from the naive young pranksters they once were but still able to banter, speculate and hyphotesize like they used to — still able to grasp each other's worldview... Part of me always thinks that Martin's rebuttal of Cosmo is somehow out of character and abrupt; that, in sync as they still seem to be, the characters should have been able to arrive at some compromise solution...

But that's just me being a romantic and a dreamer. Irrespective of how the scene pans out in the end, it does name the root cause of a lot of the world's problems. Namely: money. The last item on my list of things holding back game development (and humanity in general, though that's neither here nor there).

If you look at game development cycles over the past three decades and correlate them with the quality of the resultant releases (which I haven't, except in the sense of having lived through 'em), you will quickly notice a few disturbing trends.

First, the divide between indie and AAA studios has grown tremendously. Nowadays, companies seem to fall into one of two camps at the polar ends of the spectrum. That of 1) tiny Indies, which have passion, originality and talent but not the clout to produce complex, extensive titles; or 2) stodgy behemoth AAAs, which have resources aplenty to make something truly unique and revolutionary, but contend themselves excreting visually stunning turds devoid of any soul or substance.

What I would call the Journeyman Studios – those singular gems of yore that used to straddle the middle ground between the two extremes while remaining free of Big Publisher influence – are all but gone nowadays (much like the rapidly diminishing middle class). Just look at poor Obsidian, Double Fine and Rare, which were all gobbled up by the insatiable Microsoft. Or BioWare, swallowed by the black hole that is EA. Or Psygnosis, Naughty Dog, Guerilla and – dare I say – Bungie, which all now slush about in the bottomless gullet of Sony.

The small studios keep getting smaller, while the big ones are so ridiculously wealthy, they idle away their time absorbing anything that'll sell – including each other (like Microsoft's ongoing attempt to ingest Activision Blizzard).

And while outliers do exist (like CD Projekt Red, Egosoft, Deck Nine or Subset Games), they constitute a fraction of the market unable to contend with the ponderous, inexorable advance of Big Money acquisitions.

Second, development times keep getting shorter while the overall quality of the releases (artistic and technical) keeps dropping like mercury on a cold winter's day. Just look at the Dragon Age series. Origins took BioWare seven years to put together, while its direct sequel (Dragon Age II) was rushed through at EA's insistence in a little bit more than a year (EA gave BioWare 14 to 16 months to finish the title), with predictable results (a shoddily cobbled-together story, stripped-down gameplay and truly meh visual assets).

And while the reasoning behind this is translucent (corporations exist to make money) and some of the seven-fold difference in development time can be chalked up to world building and asset creation, the remainder of the rush is down to greed – pure and simple.

The results of rushing through development are easy to foresee.

On the developer side, burnout is now a prevalent, industry-wide phenomenon (what with ambitious young devs being stressed out to the point of developing ulcers and coughing up blood, coming down with PTSD or suffering nervous breakdowns) and core game elements do not get the attention they deserve (which manifests as poor writing, the lack of proper testing or Q&A and overt reliance on future patches instead of doing due diligence the first time around).

On the leadership front, Middle Management Muppets who were unable to function effectively under normal scheduling arrangements (as Middle Management is wont to do) cannot keep up with the increased pace, leading to (more) poor planning, disruptive last-minute changes, scheduling conflicts and the like.

And, on top of everything else, we get periodic, massive, industry-wide layoffs as studios bend over backwards to appease shareholders and boost stock prices to eke out every last penny possible at the cost of people whose health and general well-being they run into the ground to meet unreasonable deadlines.

Lastly, (and possibly most distressing), is the fact that with the transition from studios Meant To Produce Games to studios Meant To Produce A Profit, a concerning amount of decision-making is being left in the hands of People Who Understand Money – which is a monumental mistake.

There's that old adage, right? "Would you prefer a fast surgeon or a good one?" Well, to translate it into gaming parlance: "Would you prefer a game that'll turn a profit or a game you will enjoy playing"? 'Cause the two are not necessarily the same thing...

People Who Understand Money do so for money's sake and their sole focus is turning a larger profit. And while that may make for a more attractive balance sheet, it leaves their decision making biased towards what sells without any regard for artistic integrity, gaming innovation or, indeed, common sense. Number crunchers understand numbers: they can research, with a high degree of probability, what will sell in a given market, how a target audience will respond to an element, or what genre of game is most likely to be popular at a given point in time... But the chasm between statistics, probabilities and facts and enjoyable gameplay is not one you can bridge with math.

They have no clue whether the decision they recommend will play well, but – because money is increasingly becoming the point of the exercise – they often get the deciding vote on what goes in and what gets cut. And that might be a very efficient process for making a Profitable Product but a means of making a Meaningful Game it most certainly is not.

At the end of the day, the sole benefit of making money the focus of any given endeavor is that it will (possibly) get you more money, while the detriments, on the other hand, make for a long and distressing list.

Rather than focus on appeasing shareholders and generating profits at any cost, studios would do well to spare a bit more thought for the reason they were formed, the gaming art form and the talented people who make their products and, indeed, continued existence possible. Sacrificing your integrity and the well-being of your workforce probably can (as any number cruncher will tell you) net you a greater share of profit... But I, for one, do not think that it's a prize worth having.

Pig Recommends:

• -finding a nice, comfy middle ground between what you really want out of life and the bare minimum you can get by on; pigs get greed – believe me (if footage of me eating existed, it would be x-rated by default); it's a powerful motivator and – partly, at least – the reason humanity has persisted for as long as it has; but left unchecked, it will always land you in compromising situations and, in the end, change you in ways you may not ultimately enjoy (although, to be fair, by that point morality won't be your prime concern); heed a hog's advice: dilute your dreams a little and live on a slightly smaller scale; it's a much safer recipe for contentment;