When game development cycles get longer, blame usually falls on technology. Unreal Engine is too complicated. Games are too big. Graphics standards are too demanding. But industry veterans interviewed by Game Developer magazine in November 2025 point to a culprit nobody wants to discuss: bad leadership. When you ask developers what actually slows down game development, they describe nightmare scenarios where leaders have no understanding of how games are made, where decisions take months for no reason, and where sudden creative whims destroy months of work.
- The Leadership Gap Nobody Acknowledges
- Seven Key Traits of Poor Leaders
- The Vague Feedback Problem
- The Dark Souls Weekend Phenomenon
- Treating Developers as Interchangeable
- Failure to Trust Your Team
- Crunch Cultures Built on Lies
- Why No Tool Fixes This
- The Cost of Poor Leadership
- What Good Leadership Actually Looks Like
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Conclusion
The Leadership Gap Nobody Acknowledges
Bryant Francis, Senior Editor at Game Developer, investigated the question directly: why don’t more people talk about bad leadership slowing down game development? The answer was uncomfortable. When asked about production timeline delays, developers mentioned technology first. But when pressed privately about what really held projects back, they explained leadership failures in exhaustive detail.
The magazine interviewed six industry veterans, many requesting anonymity to discuss their experiences without fear of retaliation. Their testimonies paint a consistent picture: poor leadership compounds every other development challenge. You can have the best technology and most talented team. But if leaders are making bad decisions, those advantages disappear.
Seven Key Traits of Poor Leaders
Game Developer identified patterns across multiple studios and projects. These behaviors consistently appear in studios struggling with timeline slippage, team departures, and project cancellations.
Failing to Understand Game Development Realities
Some leaders skip essential development stages they don’t understand. A 3D rigger described leads who skipped the grey-boxing step of level design and jumped straight into art production. This forced teams to redo massive amounts of work when level design inevitably changed. Other leaders would approve content for production, then throw it out after review because they got bored playing it repeatedly. This “circular iteration” wasted months producing final versions nearly identical to earlier discarded work.
Anonymous producers reported leaders who demanded expensive, polished prototypes early in development to understand what designers were pitching. These elaborate demos were discarded immediately after approval. The team spent time on “fake” content that looked final but was never going into the actual game.
Poor Project Management and Timeline Blindness
Leaders often have zero understanding of departmental dependencies or realistic timelines. Masao Kobayashi described studios where project leads set deadlines without understanding which tasks depend on other teams finishing first. Teams end up spinning their tires waiting for upstream work while others are overwhelmed with poorly-scoped tasks that should wait.
Paralysis Through Indecision
One anonymous developer recalled a department lead utterly incapable of making decisions. When presented with three equally viable options, this lead would take months to decide. Meanwhile, the entire team waited in frustration while this lead obsessed over story details. Whether it’s one person or a committee, slow decision-making creates massive downstream effects.
The Vague Feedback Problem
Some of the most frustrating moments developers described involved being criticized with zero actionable guidance. A level designer recalled their coworker summarizing vacuous feedback from a lead: “Get me a rock. No, not that one. A better rock.” They would iterate until string lock forced the team to ship whatever the last version was. No clarity, no direction, just endless iteration until deadline.
Double Fine and Two Player Productions’ documentary on Psychonauts 2 captured this perfectly. Studio founder Tim Schafer and project lead Zak McClendon offered unclear feedback that frustrated employees. Some designers spent time on R&D indefinitely rather than contributing to actual Alpha development.
The Dark Souls Weekend Phenomenon
Developers have a running joke about what happens when a game director plays a popular game over the weekend. They return Monday morning with directives to implement similar mechanics. The “Dark Souls phenomenon” has been happening for over a decade as creative leads play Bloodborne or Elden Ring, then demand their game copy these features.
This can happen with TV shows and movies too. A writer described directors watching a trending series, then demanding sudden narrative changes. If these happen late in production, the cascading effects across all departments are devastating. The best leaders, by contrast, actually listened when employees explained why a requested feature wasn’t feasible or would require too much time.
Treating Developers as Interchangeable
Poor leaders assume one developer can replace another. This ignores the accumulated institutional knowledge that departs when experienced staff leave. Some studios expect junior developers to immediately master genres they’ve never worked in. Others apply a hard cap on hourly workers’ hours, inadvertently driving them to do unpaid work in off-hours just to stay competitive with salaried colleagues.
Failure to Trust Your Team
Leaders who don’t trust employees’ assessments of workload or feasibility create additional pressure. An employee says a task can’t be done on the timeline? Instead of listening, poor leaders assume the employee is being lazy or incompetent. They push harder, demand more speed, and don’t believe their team’s warnings. Quality assurance teams warning about critical bugs? Ignored until those bugs explode in production.
Crunch Cultures Built on Lies
Many studios maintain policies claiming “we don’t crunch” while setting impossible deadlines. The math doesn’t add up. Teams work 60+ hour weeks to hit the schedule, but nobody officially acknowledges crunch is happening. Vague policies about “occasional overtime” mask systemic overwork. Developers described scenarios where studios promised no crunch then penalized people for not hitting targets that required overtime.
Why No Tool Fixes This
The game industry loves talking about how new tools will speed up development. AI-powered development. Better engines. Smarter middleware. But as Bryant Francis writes in Game Developer: “No tool—AI or otherwise—can speed up game development if leaders don’t rise to the occasion.”
You can build the fastest racecar in the world. But if the team owner keeps shuffling mechanics, engineers, and drivers around, if they make decisions randomly, if they change directions every weekend based on whatever entertainment they consumed, that racecar will never win. Better tools don’t matter if leaders are wasting developers’ time with bad decisions and poor planning.
The Cost of Poor Leadership
The consequences compound. Projects slip. Talented developers leave. Remaining staff burn out. Morale collapses. Then more experienced staff depart, leaving junior developers trying to figure out what they’re doing. Some studios enter a death spiral where talent gaps force them to hire inexperienced developers, who make mistakes because they lack mentorship, which drives more experienced people away.
This is particularly devastating in an industry already struggling with senior talent shortage. According to industry observers, the UK games industry needs about twice as much senior talent as it currently has. When that talent abandons studios due to poor leadership, it doesn’t just hurt that one project. It deprives other teams of mentors and institutional knowledge.
What Good Leadership Actually Looks Like
Developers interviewed by Game Developer recognized excellent leadership when they experienced it. Good leaders listen when employees explain what’s feasible. They make decisions clearly and quickly rather than creating decision paralysis. They understand how game development actually works because they’ve done it themselves. They trust their teams and adjust plans based on team feedback rather than personal whims.
Most importantly, good leaders acknowledge when timelines need adjustment. Rather than pretending crunch isn’t happening or blaming developers for “not being efficient enough,” they face reality, adjust deadlines, and protect their team’s wellbeing. The irony is that studios that do this end up shipping better games faster than those that pretend crunch isn’t real.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is poor leadership really the biggest game development problem?
According to Game Developer’s interviews with industry veterans, poor leadership causes delays and project failures as much as any technical issue. Developers identified it as a major factor that’s rarely discussed publicly.
What’s the most common bad leadership behavior?
The most frequently cited issue was poor project management: leaders setting unrealistic timelines without understanding departmental dependencies or what developers actually need to succeed.
Can AI tools fix leadership problems?
No. According to Game Developer’s analysis, no technology—including AI—can fix development timelines if leadership decisions are causing delays. Better tools require good leadership to be effective.
Why don’t developers speak up about bad leadership?
Fear of retaliation. Many developers interviewed for the Game Developer article requested anonymity specifically to avoid consequences for criticizing their leadership.
What’s the “Dark Souls phenomenon”?
When game directors play popular games over the weekend and return demanding their team implement similar features immediately, regardless of feasibility or timeline impact.
How does poor leadership cause scope creep?
When leaders don’t understand development realities, they approve features without understanding the work required. They also make sudden changes based on trends or personal preferences, constantly expanding what needs to be built.
What happens to developers when they leave studios?
They take institutional knowledge with them. Successor developers can’t immediately replace them. The result is knowledge gaps, repeated mistakes, and reduced productivity until new people learn what departed colleagues knew.
Can studios function without crunch?
Yes, but it requires realistic timelines, good leadership, and honest communication about what’s feasible. Studios claiming “no crunch” while setting impossible deadlines are lying to themselves.
Conclusion
The game industry loves blaming long development cycles on technology complexity. Unreal Engine. Asset creation pipeline. Graphics standards. But Game Developer’s investigation reveals a more uncomfortable truth: bad leadership is slowing down game development just as much as any technical constraint. Leaders who don’t understand game development, who make indecisive decisions, who treat their team as interchangeable, and who chase random creative ideas end up wasting months of work. No amount of better tools fixes this. The solution requires honest self-reflection from studio leadership about whether they’re actually equipped to lead game development teams. That’s a conversation the industry needs to have.