Empower Leaders
In earlier articles in the Make Great Games series, we outlined a framework grounded in durable principles: Quality Over Efficiency, Principles Over Practices, Player Experience as a Whole, Start Simple & Evolve Complexity, and Cultivate Passion & Professionalism. Those ideas are only meaningful, however, if they shape real decisions inside the studio. This requires more than articulation - it requires empowerment.
A studio cannot consistently produce high-quality games if decision-making authority is centralized at the top. Nor can it succeed if decision authority is widely distributed but unmoored from shared values. Effective leadership requires both empowerment and alignment.
Decision Authority as an Operational Imperitive
Game development is inherently cross-functional and time-sensitive. Design, engineering, art, production, audio, and QA continuously make trade-offs under constraint. If the leaders must continuously escalte decisions to a higher authority the result is: diluted ownership, risk aversion, costly delays, and bottlnecks.
Empowering leaders means granting defined authority within their domains to make consequential decisions, such as:
Adjusting or reducing scope
Rejecting work that does not meet the quality bar
Re-prioritizing goals to protect player experiences
Making schedule changes when necessary
This is not about hierarchy or ego. It is about operational efficiency and clarity of responsibility. Leaders closest to the work are often best positioned to evaluate its risks, costs, and implications. However, empowerment alone is insufficient.
Principles as Alignment Mechanisms
Authority must be guided by shared principles. Without them, distributed decision-making leads to inconsistency and internal friction. The Make Great Games framework functions as an alignment mechanism. It clarifies the standards against which decisions are evaluated. For example:
If Quality Over Efficiency is a core principle, leaders are expected to protect the quality bar, even when doing so introduces short-term friction.
If Player Experience as a Whole is foundational, decisions should be evaluated not in isolation but in terms of their wholistic impact.
If Start Simple & Evolve Complexity is part of the framework, leaders should resist unnecessary architectural or feature complexity that introduces fragility.
In this structure, leaders do not ask what an executive or Director might prefer. They ask whether a decision aligns with the studio’s stated principles and the constraints they have been given. This distinction reduces ambiguity and strengthens cultural consistency. Reducing escalation while increasing ownership. Studios that centralize too much authority often experience predictable challenges:
Leaders hesitate to act without approval.
Teams optimize for optics rather than delivery.
Difficult trade-offs are deferred rather than addressed.
Empowerment addresses these issues by establishing clear domains of accountability. When leaders are trusted to act within defined boundaries, ownership increases and decision latency decreases. At the same time, empowerment increases accountability.
Authority implies responsibility for outcomes. Leaders are expected to explain and defend decisions in terms of the framework, not personal preference.
Cultural Stability During Growth
Every team starts small, usually a group of core Directors who enjoy informal processes and centralized decision making where everything goes through them. This is a very efficient and enjoyable way to work as you explore ideas and formulate a vision for the game. However, this does not scale and many leadership teams fail to recognize a need for change as the team grows. Without empowered leaders operating within a shared framework, growth introduces fragmentation. Communication slows. Intent becomes diluted. Cultural drift accelerates.
Empowerment, grounded in principles, allows alignment to scale. Leaders become carriers of the game’s vision and provide direction and guidance to subordinate leaders. Who then interpret and apply the vision an direction within their disciplines and feature teams while maintaining coherence across the broader game team. This structure reduces reliance on personality and increases reliance on shared understanding.
Empowerment requires psychological safety. Leaders must feel able to make difficult decisions—including unpopular ones—without fear of political reprisal, provided those decisions are consistent with the principles and constraints. At the same time, empowerment is not immunity. Decisions that deviate from the framework should be constructively challenged. The objective is not to protect hierarchy but to protect alignment and shared understanding. This balance fosters professional discipline. Leaders are neither overburdened by micromanagement nor permitted to operate without accountability.
Conclusion
Empowering leaders is not a motivational slogan; it is an operational imperative. When leaders are trusted to make decisions within clearly articulated principles and constraints, decision-making becomes faster, more consistent, and more effectivce. The studio becomes less dependent on individual bottlenecks and more dependent on shared understanding. The Make Great Games framework provides the principles, while senior leadership provides the constraints.
Together, they create the framework within which high-quality games can be produced repeatedly.
Let’s go make a great game!