Corporate video games, corporate art, corporate movies, corporate literature, and corporate life. Often maligned and always despised, the corporate world is only liked by people who go out of their way to refer to it as their “professional life” or some adjacent, non-offensive term or by people who belong on Linkedin and, thus, people who do not deserve the right to vote in a democratic system.
It is, in fact, not a coincidence that when the powers over a piece of art become corporate, that the art in question universally becomes worse or, more rarely, stays the same. It never improves. The movies of today are the most widely accessed form of this phenomena. Anyone can point to a superhero movie and it’s associated franchise to understand the ways in which oversaturation via corporate creation destroys the very essence of what makes a thing whole.
This article is concerned with video games: Corporate Video Games.
What is a Corpo Game?
The defining features of the corporate video game are numerous, but the actual definition of a corporate video game is simple: its a game made by an entity that defines itself as a corporation.
The tricky part about this is that any game can have the fingerprints of a corporate game, even non-corporate ones. And corporate games can have aspects to them that are reminiscent of passion projects or independently developed art. The key thing to understand about corporate video game development is that it seeks to dilute a vision to appease: appease the consumer, appease the board of directors, appease a social norm, appease a moral narrative, or appease specific individuals. Where quality independently developed games seek to do many different things, corpo games always seek to appease.
Their formula for creation is safe, their access to moral dilemmas are limited, and their talent is diluted. These three things make up the biggest aspects to corporate games’ development and its lack of artistic merit.
The Corpo’s Formula
Safety in repetition, that’s the name of the game. FIFA, Call of Duty, FromSoftware titles, Diablo, WoW, and the list really does go on into increasingly obscure title that were slowly destroyed by the repetitive and safe design choices that make up the hallmarks of the corpo formula.
If one thing makes money, then ALL products should be as close to that thing as legally possible. When considering this concept, look upon the Chinese for the mastered form of copy-cat corpo-style production. The 2025 game awards featured roughly two thousand Chinese copy-cat games of Nioh that ALL looked the same. This is because games that look like that have succeeded, and so they must be reproduced by the corpos.
Diablo 1 succeeded for many reasons, but the most obvious reasons among them endure even today in its heirs. Diablo 4 has untethered itself from any notion of slow item management and wildly different playthroughs being born of RNG. Instead, it took the ARPG formula, now so well known, and boiled it right down to a science. All enemies stay the same difficulty, all loot creeps up in power slowly, and the story is but an afterthought in a game that actually encourages you to skip the campaign. And, yet, the Diablo series is still not as guilty as its peers in showing its corporate flair.
Bethesda Game Studios is responsible for some of the fallout games and all of the relevant Elder Scrolls titles, starting with Morrowind. In Skyrim, their most famous title, the dilution of what made Morrowind and Oblivion could already be seen, but the game was so competent from a gameplay loop and fantasy perspective that it walked the line between generically appealing and “nichely appropriate for RPGers” so as to find lightning in a bottle success with a broader audience that shall continue to endure so long as the sun continues to shine.
But their most ambitious project in the last decade, Starfield, has all but lost the ingredients that make a game worthwhile, and it is absolutely because of its corpo-roots.
Starfield tries to make itself a generic base-builder, narrative-driven, roleplaying, looter-shooter title that fails to do any one thing decently. It tries to hold the player’s hand through numerous locations of varying aesthetic and cannot even begin to find something interesting to show to the player, randomly generated or otherwise.
The shortcomings of Starfield, and their corporate seeds, do not end with the bigger things. The aesthetics themselves are barred by an HR department that cannot want for more nagging claws folded over the whole of the game. The character selection screen makes sure to separate body type from pronoun selection. The inclusion of a pronoun option, while entirely predictable and generally inconsequential to things that actually matter, is absolutely a marker of appeasement. It’s included to appease. Appease who? Women. And men who think they’re women.
A very small minority of people, clinging to a fabrication of social identity that has, somehow, dressed itself up as a moral superposition, both defying reality while seeing itself as extraordinarily grounded in its virtue, which flies well above the certainty of its own two feet.
It’s the corpo formula, and it doesn’t matter if it’s good. It matters if it appeases.
The Corpo Moral Dilemma
When a studio becomes corporate, it also becomes tied to the HR department. Human Resources functions as an entity that aims to maintain corporate culture. Where I come from, this culture begins its culmination in the classroom, headed overwhelmingly by women. The culture seeks to neuter boys and men, and prop up girls and women as a group that doesn’t just succeed within the corpo-system, but succeeds despite men doing everything in their power to stop them from doing so.
More girls stick with this culture than boys, but neither sex fully attunes their being to the corpo-culture. Out of those individuals that do, all that’s left is a group that is either fully neutered or entirely sure of their own oppression. Both of which continue straight out of school into the corporate lifestyle. Many of these people, in fact, end up in HR departments. And thus, we have what Bethesda is commandeered by.
Take a look at what Bethesda tries to pawn off as a something akin to a strip club.
HR approved, safe, and all together gross. Just as all of Starfield is: a microcosm of itself.
And this is because the corporation, which is spread so wide and has to appease to many before work can be approved, is doubly restricted when trying to take risks with its storytelling. It isn’t impossible for good stories to be told, mind you. CDPR can attest to wielding a large net while still being able to catch the smaller, often just as important, fish. Although, CDPR had a team of around 100 working on CP2077, while Bethesda Game Studios had roughly 500 working on Starfield before it was released, so the increase in size is still suspect.
Morrowind’s story was a brutal tale about a native population and their fight with a stronger force taking over their land. It had themes of abandonment, loss of morals, slavery, rape, betrayal, a vying god-hood, and a future that doesn’t necessarily hold anything like what we might call justice.
Oblivion’s tale was much lighter, all things considered. And it’s presentation was much more consumer friendly. But it still took risks to change what people might expect from Bethesda moving forward.
Cut to today, and whatever art is still left in that studio is either being completely used up to finish (or get started on) TES VI or is gone altogether. Starfield is the HR department’s dream of a corporate game: mostly cancer, a side of fries and one coffee, extra sugar.
Diluted Talent
There is always going to be the best at a studio; the best developer, the best programmer, best artist, best receptionist, best intern, et cetera, et cetera. But the corporate video game is not created around what the vision of the best is, it isn’t created around anything at all. It is, in fact, created upon a flat plane that spans hundreds of people, working on facets of the game’s DNA without knowing what the other end of the spectrum will look like.
The corporation has access to funds, and it has access to an HR department, which likes to hire a wide array of varying people for their unique perspectives.
The perspective of the original Halo trilogy, created by Bungie, revolved around the vision of the developers at the studio. With about 70 developers total, the crew created one of the greatest shooters of all time in Halo 2. Two women, in administrative roles, are listed as having worked at Bungie full time during this game’s production.
Fast forward to today, and Bungie, responsible for the shame that is Destiny 2, is comprised of roughly one third women.
And, so, what’s the point of mentioning that at all? That women can’t write? Or program? Or develop? All of these things are demonstrably untrue. That point is that when companies, often started by men, become successful, they grow so much that it becomes profitable for them to begin hiring women for the sake of it. Women are thrown onto the creative teams, and alongside corpo-culture that is safe, predictable, and unwilling to delve into moral obscurities, creates a product that struggles to even call itself bad art, let alone art in a vacuum. Indeed, corpos cannot create art, they can only build mockeries of it.
