I came across this today on Reddit. I'll highlight a few quotes, but I recommend the entire read... [b]Fries: Publishers created a void that indies stepped into // GamesIndustry International[/b] [i]At the DICE Summit earlier this month, industry veteran Ed Fries gave a passionate and quite personal talk about his love of "making stuff" and he recalled how an atmosphere at Microsoft eventually became toxic enough that it interfered with that. Following his presentation, GamesIndustry International sat down with the former Xbox leader to learn more....[/i] http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-02-20-fries-publishers-created-a-void-that-indies-stepped-into [quote]"We [were told that we] need to do less and less things and we need to do bigger and better... That's infected the whole console industry where every year there are fewer and fewer titles and they are less and less innovative" "So the conversation kind of goes, 'You're not making enough money.' And I'd say something ridiculous like, 'Well we could make more money if you'd allow me to put Halo on PlayStation.' 'You can't do that,' they say of course. I say, 'Well stop bugging me about making more money then.' So you're kind of in this box where you're really expected to do platform leading work but if you're also trying to make a profit it's very difficult with the size of the market you can address when you're a minority share console," he lamented. Fries desired nothing more than to foster more creativity within the Xbox studio system, but at a big corporation like Microsoft, nothing matters more than the bottom line. It was difficult for Fries to come to grips with this, and it's unfortunately endemic to the AAA publishing business.[/quote] [quote]It all came to a head for Fries and his career as development on Halo 2 progressed. The "forces" were too strong to ignore. Halo 2, the straw that broke the camel's back "After Halo 1 had shipped, Jason Jones, the creative genius behind the series, wanted to go off with a small group and create a second Bungie franchise. I was a fan of that [idea] and they went off to do work on that and the plan was for all the different leads from Halo to go ahead and do Halo 2 as a committee, without Jason [overseeing it]. After a year and a half or so of trying to do that, it became clear that it wasn't working - they actually need that guy and he's central to its success - so Jason came back and reevaluated the progress they had made and made a number of pretty serious course corrections to what would become Halo 2," Fries recalled. "He came to me and said he needed another year. I went to my boss and said it needs another year. Obviously it's a very important project to Xbox as a whole. His idea was we should have a vote among his directors. There was a head of marketing, who was a Hollywood guy who'd come in not too long before, there was a head of finance who was a Hollywood guy, and there was a head of OS and head of hardware and myself. We went into the meeting and the choices were basically, do we force the Bungie team to ship the product that they don't want to ship on the original schedule or do we give them the year they needed to make the product they want to make on the most important franchise we had?"[/quote] [quote]You can probably guess what happened from here. Those "forces" started to reveal themselves to Fries. "The vote was unanimous, other than me, that we should force the team to stick to the original schedule. So coming out of that meeting I threatened to quit immediately and my boss relented and gave us the extra year. But it was clear to me that the writing was on the wall that this was the way things would be going forward. And for less important franchises, less important products, I would have even less leverage than I had in that particular case," he explained.[/quote] [quote]Fries had had more than enough. By January 2004, a full ten months before Halo 2 shipped, he announced his resignation, leaving a spot vacant for Shane Kim to fill. Fries had nothing but good things to say about Kim. "I left because it was a bad situation and other people had to go in and try to clean up that situation. They had less clout than me - I'd been at the company for 18 years, so to take someone more junior and give him the same set of problems with less leverage I think they did a pretty good job," he remarked.[/quote] [b]TL;DR: Fries remarks on his time with Microsoft back during the Halo 2 era and how the bottom line overshadowed everything else. It created a void that indie developers ultimately filled.[/b]