alt Hacker NewsProbably not a popular take, but it's fairly common to have CEO's for big company who where never part of the production of one of the product they company sells. The idea is that at some point, your business is so large and oversee too many projects. Intuition, and experience doesn't cut it. Big firm want rationalization. This is why management become obsess with metrics, KPI and such. It rationalizes business decision. This won't be business that innovate, but that's not what their investor wants. Shareholders at EA want predictable reasonable growth, and governance match that. You don't get brought up by EA, Microsoft, Activision, etc, and then act surprise that management want you to produce "generic AAA game with a coat of paint based on X popular franchise".
Innovation and risk taking is something that smaller business do.
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That kind of stuff is why the film industry has cycles of actors starting production companies, overturning the hierarchy with their money and successes, followed by them getting bored, selling out, the business becoming more businesslike until they start forking enough money to actors again that they again can produce their own stuff.
Netflix and co, might upend or stall that cycle, same as Steam/MS/etc can stagnate the games business.
I think games still has a cycle or two before being totally stagnant though, but regulators are working hard to fix that.
There is very few companies where the executives don't engage with their own product. Imaging a film studio where the CEO has never watched a movie, or a publishing house where the CEO doesn't read books. I don't think you need to enjoy the product personally but you do need to engage with the medium at the very least to be able to understand what you are selling and to whom you should listen for feedback.
On the other hand, FromSoftware, creators of games such as dark souls, bloodborne, and elden ring, placed their main director as CEO. He still directs their main games, and admits to focus more on games than on business.
The trend has been they focus on quality, rarely compromising their vision, which started as niche gameplay ideas that are now a new genre, adopted in many new games. And the effect has been that they got a reputation for quality, and sell more and more games with each new release, with elden ring selling like 36M copies.
I think Innovation in big companies does happen, but often it get's stiffled by the bean counters before something comes by it, but that is also a good thing. Small businesses should always have the potential to bring the goliath to its knees if the big business has outlived is usefulness to society as a whole.
That business model is at odds with any creative enterprise. It's one thing to scale a business that has a successful product that needs very little improvement over time other than efficiency gains which can be handled by a management class whose only involvement needs to be ensuring the core model is maintained and not degraded while improving operational efficiency. It's a very different thing to having to constantly innovate and create new and better products especially when those products need their own artistic merit to stand on. If you're just making the next FIFA game you'll be fine but anything that requires a plot will go over like a lead balloon.