Lucien Parsons

Lucien is a Fractional COO, Advisor, and investor.  He co-founded ZeniMax Online, was AWS' Global Partner Leader for Games, and was Chair of the IGDA.  He combines operational rigor with product, market, and financial strategy expertise to help game companies grow.

The Foreseeable Failures: Why Good Games Keep Dying for the Same Reasons

After twenty years of post-mortems, GDC talks, and investor debriefs, the causes of studio failure have converged on a recognizable list, yet the same failures keep occurring at otherwise competent studios with talented teams. This roundtable asks why: not what the failure categories are, but why experienced leaders keep stepping into them, and what structural or psychological conditions make early warning signs so easy to rationalize away.

Participants will use a seven-category framework as a common reference point, bringing their own examples of cases where the problem was visible in advance and discussing what it would have taken to act on it earlier. The session is designed to surface collective pattern recognition rather than individual advice, with the aim of giving everyone at the table a sharper model to spot trouble early and address it.