Industry’s creativity ‘worse than the 90s’

The co-creator of one of the most successful games of the 1990s has made audacious criticisms of the modern business.

Jon Hare, designer Sensible Software’s Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder, believes the craft of making games began to worsen when it “bloated with far too much middle management all wanting their own slice of the pie and shareholders demanding never-ending short-term success.”

In an interview with games site Beef Jack, Hare said he was earning more money and enjoying his work more in the mid-nineties than today.

“I feel that creatively, from a software design point of view, it went from being a very powerful, innovative industry to a creatively weaker, me-too industry at about the same time,” he said.

Hare has struggled to make an impact in the games business to the extent that he did with Sensible Soccer in the 90s. In recent years he helped develop a number of rehashes of his breakthrough title.

Nevertheless he believes sequels will be “the death of the industry.”

He said: “From my point of view, commercially, [the games industry] has gone backwards because I am making less money, because the middle managers and their bean-counting overlords have largely disempowered the creative intellectual property generators from having sufficient influence and power within the industry.

“The business people who make the really big decisions would happily abandon this industry for another one once they have sucked the life out of it”.