Eidos Montreal founder says gaming execs now run on spreadsheets, not passion

Stephane D'Astous, founder and former general manager of Eidos Montreal, sat down with Thunderpick to talk about how the games industry's leadership has fundamentally shifted over the past 15 years — and his diagnosis isn't flattering.

D'Astous points to the sheer scale of today's players as the root of the problem. Tencent went from a footnote to an 800-pound gorilla, and Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund is now circling EA — scenarios nobody would have predicted in 2010. With that consolidation comes a different kind of decision-maker: "The people with the money and the decision power are much fewer, and their pockets are much deeper… they don't have the same DNA of the decision maker 15 years ago; it's much more Excel than passion-driven." He also lays part of the blame on the Covid-era funding free-for-all, when money flooded into projects that had no business getting greenlit. "When I saw some of those… I said, 'That idea was funded? Oh my god, this is bad news,'" he said, warning that the fallout from those bad investments is still incoming.

The practical result, D'Astous says, is executives demanding the impossible — he claims he's been asked multiple times to build a Witcher 3-scale game on a limited budget, in under four years, with a brand-new team. That kind of expectation gap, combined with years of mass layoffs and corporate mismanagement, makes it hard to argue things haven't gotten measurably worse since his heyday at Eidos Montreal.

With studios under more revenue pressure than ever, the conditions for genuine risk-taking look thin. D'Astous isn't predicting a turnaround anytime soon, and given the industry's recent track record, it's difficult to push back on that read.