Corporate meddling gets blamed for ruining things all the time but the truth few want to admit is that some amount of meddling is necessary.
Look at all the big flops Xbox has released over the last year - Redfall being a prime example. We kept hearing how Microsoft was happy to leave those studios to it, to give them the time and resources they needed and they still released dog shit.
When it comes to AAA, it’s so expensive you need some amount of corporate input to make sure people will actually buy the damn game.
Of course there’s extremes to both sides - pretty much anything Activision ever touched was ground to a lifeless micro transaction shell.
But everything we know about concord is trekking6 us that the team itself, including the big bosses, were overly positive internally. Nobody had the balls to interfere.
If they had just one exec who was willing to piss the entire team off, maybe the result would be different.
I don’t think you can claim that the team behind concord is incompetent. I think they delivered something that nobody wanted but they delivered that competently.
I agree that incompetence generally doesn’t end up with a good product but sometimes even good competence all around doesn’t win. Sometimes it really is luck and timing.