Something just occurred to me: if you think about it, what makes The Initiative any different from a freelance Hollywood scriptwriter?
The idea behind them is to create game design ideas and documents to then shop & sell to other developers, right? Let's assume that's the case. Well, how's that any different than a Hollywood freelance scriptwriter who shops their scripts to studios (or producers? I don't know) to be made into film projects? And if you know anything about that, more often then not those people who sell their scripts, are out of the picture once the script is sold. There's no telling when the rights are optioned by the studio to do anything with the script, and they usually end up getting script doctors who heavily rewrite the script anyway.
By the time the actual film comes about, it can be extremely different from that original script which was sold, and any accolades or criticisms are laid upon the people directly involved in the film, 99% of the time not including the random person who sold them the script in the first place. That's what The Initiative sounds like to me, but AFAIK the way the gaming industry is ran is not the same as Hollywood, even if there are similarities.
What I want to really say is, since developer studios tend to form in a way where all the game idea concepts and design work happens internally, why would any of them need a design document from an outside firm like The Initiative? Developers tend to brainstorm game concepts and design elements among their own stable of employees, right? And for studios that get picked up by publishers, I doubt publishers work with or acquire those studios unless they can, among other things, either come up with their own game ideas or work on ones that come down from the publisher.
Which really means if anything The Initiative would be the type of place that sends these design documents, game concepts/ideas to publishers, not developers. And then the publisher decides on what developers they'd want to work on the concept from there. So there's a couple ways to actually look at this news.
The first is that what's happening with the turnover is extremely alarming and signs of development hell, the game potentially being in big trouble and Crystal Dynamics coming in to save it. However, if you look at it from the perspective of The Initiative as that freelancing Hollywood scriptwriter... maybe this is just par for the course with what they were always going to do? Meaning, they were never going to actually develop the game themselves, just the concept, and they only needed but so many people for so long to scope out the concept. They are already owned by a publisher, in Microsoft, so then Microsoft goes looking for a studio to develop the concept into a full game and since Gallagher has ties to Crystal Dynamics, they work out some deal with Square-Enix so CD is the developer for Perfect Dark. Since Gallagher was already a studio head at CD, and CD has a very top-down hierarchy with the way they develop games, it just also happens to be a natural fit.
None of this changes the reality that Perfect Dark is many years away, IMHO. Again it's probably not coming before 2026. However, I am trying to see this from the other side of the coin and be optimistic/hopeful and this is the one way where it all makes sense. However it's also extremely odd because most developers in the industry, to my knowledge, don't work like this. Development studios seem to have their own self-contained creative core who can come up with game design concepts of their own, then do fuller development, and outsource chunks of stuff to support studios. Or alternatively, the ideas they work on come from publishing management, but the key point is that the vertical integration is still there.
What Microsoft and The Initiative have going on here is almost the opposite of that vertical integration in terms of the way the development pipeline would form, because I'm guessing now with CD on the game, The Initiative's role is more or less finished. Either that, or the remaining members phase into Crystal Dynamics for Perfect Dark and maybe resume their posts at The Initiative for the next game they want to build out a design scope for? Again, it seems really unusual for the games industry based on what little I know of how development works there, but if you look at Hollywood, it's actually quite common.
Other than that, the optics on this are still very bad IMO and something needs to be shown with this game soon in order to change quickly souring impressions.
