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I love my Steam Deck, but I hate that it‘s still the best gaming handheld on the market. Valve has been pretty transparent about their process of getting the Deck right. Things like working with AMD to create a mobile APU optimized for gaming, using an optimized OS and an optimized UI, balancing performance and battery life, using and iterating over the controller design, leveraging FOSS and so on.

But somehow no one else seems use all of this knowledge, trying to innovate on top of it. Sure, there are handhelds which take some of these learnings into account, but never enough of them to actually improve on the Deck as a whole. I would have expected other manufacturers to catch up with Valve four years after the Deck‘s release. I don‘t like only getting excited about gaming hardware made by a single company.

Franz Reichelt, the Flying Tailor, seemed to be pretty sure he could fly when, in 1912, he tried testing a wingsuit he designed himself. By jumping from the Eiffel Tower. He could not fly.

I think this really depends on the company’s culture and size. From my experience, having only worked in smaller teams, I’d say trying to partake in management duties proactively has probably been most successful for colleagues who wanted to lead.

So when your boss or supervisor has a meeting about your product, ask if you can join. If you have a well thought-out idea on how to improve things, like introducing better processes, fixing recurring issues, introducing better tools or something like that, talk about it. Being visible as someone who genuinely cares about the success of your team, product and company is, in my experience, probably the most important thing.

Just make sure this is actually what you want. Depending on the company, you might end up doing very little programming and lots of spreadsheets and misery instead. Find out what’s keeping your current team lead busy and ask yourself if that’s really what you want to do.

Well, you could argue that it‘s a valuable learning resource. It was one of the biggest failures in gaming history and to really understand why it failed so badly, it would be best to actually play it. But, like I‘ve said, I personally don‘t think it‘s a good idea to waste the developers‘ time on a game which they know won‘t be fun. I‘d much rather have them working on a new, enjoyable game where they can apply what they’ve learned from Anthem‘s failure.

While that might be true on the surface, I just don‘t think it‘s worth it.

Anthem has had many problems and being a live service game was just one of them. Converting it to a single player game wouldn‘t solve the myriads of other issues like boring mission design, a very samey and needlessly huge world, loading screens everywhere or the complete disconnect between story and gameplay where you get too much story within the main hub having to listen to NPCs babbling for hours, while getting practically no story at all while actually playing the game.

Making the game playable again would be a good thing for preservation, but I really can‘t imagine a lot of people actually having fun with it. I think it would be a better use of the developers’ time to analyze the many reasons for the game‘s failure objectively and learn from that for future projects. I don’t think this former exec has really done that, if he still thinks Anthem is salvageable as a game.