This video sheds a lot of light as to why the game feels rushed

Cool. What’s the solution.

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Didn’t watch the video, couldn’t be bothered but learned my lesson: never preordering a Forza game again.

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Okay thx for the tip, Microsoft 18-6 => never buying them a game again will never be something.
Poor devs on top of that -_-
Corporate stupidity at its finest, u said it well.

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Personally I think a good baseline would be the opposite of whatever Reagan did. I would also accept a 99-100% tax bracket for billionaires.

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Ok. How does the world (not just the US) get to that goal.

Overt “profit at all costs” capitalism certainly doesn’t make great video games. It’s the soulless penny pinching to stack executive profits that end up being the demise of so many games. I don’t know what a “socialism video game” is supposed to be, but I do know that video games are ALWAYS better when profits are not the most important element to them. The art of the craft is.

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A good start would be to reenforce antitrust laws and union strength back to something resembling the 1960s. The attack on the middle class and workers rights began in earnest with “The Powell Memo” in 1971.

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The issue lies with “middle management syndrome”

“middle management syndrome” is where a business hires people who are not professionally tied to the product or service that is the core component of the business. People like analysts, consultants, etc. They do their analysis of the business, and decide that the need for more consultants, strategeists, and other such positions exists, and usually get their way in hiring more people like themselves. Those new people will then need assistants, staff, and the hiring snowball continues- usually unchecked for years, until middle management bloats to the point where business administration staff outnumber the actual number of people making the good or providing the service, and profits start to suffer.

Those Middle managers then start doing “cost analysis”- and those cost “savings” will ALWAYS come from departments that they see as lesser than their own- production, r&d, design, IT, maintenance, etc. Those jobs are either eliminated or outsourced to contract labor. Profits go up temporarily, shareholders are happy, and the cycle of middle management bloat begins again. With each successive round of the “bloat and cut” cycle, the number of people at the company actually doing the thing that is on the side of the building dwindles. Morale and retention fall, and the product or service suffers.

How do they rectify the situation they created? Usually by bringing in (you guessed it) more middle management. Production engineers, consultants and analysts are brought in to try and dumb down production to the point where it is somewhere near the quality and rate that were present before they replaced the skilled and motivated workforce with the cheapest labor they can source reliably. And all of those new analysts and consultants need staff and such, so the bloat cycle happens again, and the squeeze on the people who actually do the thing on the side of the building continues until the labor or production is nearly all outsourced or shifted to another country where labor is cheaper.

Innovation is stifled because the remaining production staff (or service providers) are usually so unskilled or uninterested in the product that no thought is given as to how it might be improved, or any thought actually given is either
a) kept to the employee themselves (because no future at the company+ no team mentality+ no incentive= no reason to share)
or
b) dismissed immediately because it didn’t come from the middle management hivemind.

When or if the business begins to fail, they’ll put all their “accomplishments” on their resumes, and descend like a swarm of locusts onto the next growing business- and repeat the whole process again.

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It is a complex issue because, to paraphrase some billionaire, you can spend away a billion on stuff, but after that the only thing left to buy is influence. That roughly means media groups and lobbies in the West, presidents and generals in the rest.

We kinda need to be outraged louder than they can broadcast their interests, which is easier said than done.

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I found the OPs story heartbreaking. He truly has a passion for what he’s doing and it’s criminal that him and other young people have to put up with this kind of treatment. I’m old GenX and I truly feel for young people, I have 3 of my own that are starting or getting ready to start their careers so I’m on their side.

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Well I’ve learned my lesson.
Vote with your money - don’t buy a product until you know 100% it’s worth the money.
Brand loyalty and having faith in corporate entities is a mistake - they will abuse it.

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But it brings them money, so they’ll claim it does. I suppose the cost to make a fully functional Forza Motorsport that would satisfy more people would outweigh their calculated sales and thus profits, so they just didn’t bother.

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My work is so far into the bloat part of this cycle…

If it wasn’t paying me to take classes toward another degree, I would have been out of here ages ago.

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R.I.P. Forza Motorsport. I guess I’ll be buying the next gen PlayStation. Phil Spencer is saying the next gen Xbox will be “the biggest leap” in technology ever. With how their main FPS and Racing games did, there’s nothing keeping me here anymore.

You can’t fake passion. Kunos and Polyphony have that going for them. Greenwalt isn’t Kazunori in the slightest bit and it shows. Can’t wait for more content like this when T10 dissolves.

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Didn’t Sarah Bond say that?

But either way, it did come from the Spencer, Bond and, Booty show, so I know where to look. I didn’t watch it yet.

As for the 18-6 model. Something that is costing Microsoft dearly with this is expierence. Someone with familiarity on a project can get things done quicker and better find short comings. Rotating someone new in every 18 months is never going to get that for MS.

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This rotation doesnt necessarily mean theres only new people. Im sure this practice is common throughout the industry with many of these contractors jumping from company to company until they get a full time position if thats what theyre looking for.

I think the real issue is this is extremely inefficient. Even if someone came back after 6 months of being gone, numerous things would have changed, team members, tools, possibly changes in direction etc. If its their second go round and basically know theres no employment opportunity im sure theyre a little less enthused and as driven as this particular guy was.

I believe what djtree wrote above is the main culprit plaguing many businesses today. The faults in this game are due to middle and upper management. Unfortunately there is no happy ending here as theres nothing thats going to change this type of business practice. Microsoft would sooner close the studio than to increase the budget for more full-time employees.

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Corporate greed and bad management aside, if government wasn’t regulating benefits and healthcare then companies wouldn’t be turning over temp workers to skirt the regulations. Just saying.

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Well, that is certainly a take.

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So youd rather these temp workers perpetually work without benefits and healthcare as thats the exact reason these laws were put in place.

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Value employees enough to give them proper employment so they can truly connect with the company and the products they make, delivering long term shareholder value?

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