It’s not that they don’t understand it. It’s that they literally can’t afford to adopt it.

Corporate ownership, combined with being publicly traded or privately investor funded, means that you have to increase shareholder value. Stock dividends aren’t enough. So, they use the only play that they know: scale the company up.

Problem is: you can scale art, but scaling software is very hard. Book publishers and record labels figured this out ages ago: keep adding more artists and more products. Meanwhile, AAA game studios keep stacking bodies onto existing IPs, making fewer yet bigger software products instead. Meanwhile, they keep getting bodied by small upstarts like Team Cherry, because they have a better effort:payout ratio. If everyone just ran their game companies like Penguin Random House instead of Microsoft, they’d be in better shape.