Over the years of my corporate career (now retired from all that), I have sat quietly in meeting rooms with middle and senior leadership after something, some plan, some product launch had clearly failed big time. What I saw on faces yesterday looked and sounded like that. In the immediate aftermath of a milestone sinking to the bottom of the drink, leaders and management scramble for what they can get their hands on right away to stem the bleeding, hopeful to turn the tide. Mixed metaphor choices here are intentional and typical of the kind of things often said (or not) at times like these. Tears held back while facing the music from colleagues, contractors and stakeholders alike, well we are all people and the bigger we come, the harder we fall. This is not to make excuses for anyone, any entity. There are more than enough corporate mechanisms and contractural arrangements to enforce accountability, although I am not privy to what binds the game owner and their first party partners. That is not the point. From what I saw and heard yesterday, the read of the room, this miss was very big indeed. It had all the trappings of a massive miss with brutal consequences for the folks, literally, on the line.
Hearts and minds folk, hearts and minds. There is more than enough anger and hate out there in the world today to go around. We can let this be our happy place without letting those accountable off the hook. There can be no way that they do not get the gravity of our situation.