Same for the industrial/commercial construction industry. Microsoft letting these "auteurs" run wild and they're producing bomb after bomb. Hellblade 2, South Of Midnight, Everwild, Perfect Dark, Scalebound, Contraband, and this game. Where the hell is Fable and State Of Decay 3? These developers get under Microsoft and all of the sudden become "slugs". We have a saying about that kind of behavior in my trade. "Hide & Seek for a $1000 a week."
100% true. Same goes for my industry... consumer goods/manufacturing. Funny how every industry has the same thing happen isnt it?
They are under the wing of billion dollar corporations, so as you said it's easy to fly under the radar doing junk until eventually someone finds out or puts some focus into it. You just need people to dig into the details and inform. On the other hand, if these small indie games are their own independent studio and that's the only game they are focusing on, everyone has no choice but to focus on it.
Sales teams are like that. Everyone at the company has their eyeballs on the big account teams, so they got nowhere to hide, since everyone from execs down to the warehouse managers want to know what's going on with Walmart and Costco. But nobody is going to give a shit who or what goes on at Highland Farms or Pharmasave. Some of the accounts are so small, even the directors dont even know what kind of sales they do or which broker salesperson even works on the account. So small, they dont even have an internal employee working on it. It's packaged out to third party brokers. But they sure will know every detail what's going on at the Amazon team.
So every person working in these small fry teams can coast if they are lucky enough to get a long leash. Even if they dont hit their targets, nobody notices or if the company still did great so who cares about grilling the small accounts. Everyone have a good Xmas and let's all be happy and back in January as the company hit wall st numbers.
So for anyone working in an office, there's perks working on the big accounts and projects since it gets noticed. And if you do great, you'll probably get a promotion out of it. But for those of you who want less stress and possibly execs and finance and other depts not noticing you as your numbers never hit the radar and you can sit at the back of the room knowing nobody will ask you questions in big meetings, work on those small leftover kinds of accounts.
Just note at some point someone will notice your small account. After everyone scrutinizes the big $400M accounts, eventually someone will eyeball your $4M account and ask whats going on and why things are tanking.