> there's no numbers to steer you. you need an opinionated director, auteur, not an excel monkey.
In most games you can't just fully drop a feature because other systems are designed with it in mind. It will end up broken like Veilguard or Andromeda. You can eat the cost and finish it or spend even more time cutting it out properly. The only cheap solution is release the unfinished game in early access, add the delayed features after and then do 1.0 with the original scope.
AAA publishers can't do that because they love their movie style reveals at industry shows and building up insane hype before launch. They also don't want to sell the game at a discount during EA which is standard practice for indies.
And selling an unfinished game with the promise that it will get fixed later is a bad look when you have thousands of employees, no matter what actually happened behind the scenes.
as the console product line, it's just dead, nobody knows which xbox is the old or the new one, microsoft themselves probably can't figure that out too.
the issue with game execs is not just that they don't understand game development, but software development in general. game execs absolutely love scope creep. then they try to fight the growing scope by adding more people onto the project - when it's common knowledge that makes the project even more delayed. if you can't deliver a project, you have to deliver less, not add employees.
writing this I thought this might be why live service games fare better. they force the modern agile software engineering into games. the exec gets feedback and kpi's quickly. you could try to scream some sense into them however much you want, but they won't accept that their idea is crap until it's released and the sentiment rating on their dashboard goes down in response.
the exec has absolutely no imagination or domain knowledge. without the constant feedback, they just fly blind because they can't comprehend anything but the numbers in the spreadsheet. in a multi-year development process, until you deliver the project, there's no numbers to steer you. you need an opinionated director, auteur, not an excel monkey.