That's how I often considered SE's management, and subsequently their products. It seems that more often that not, they just overthink and overdo things. I'm sure they mean well, but they lack that knack for graceful simplicity, efficiency, sleek-sobriety. Their product are often pretty yet sorely lacking in elegance.
This shows a lot in many of SE's realisations.
• User interfaces: messy, lacking sobriety, organisation, even logic —just look at how they put graphical settings all over the place in ARR… There are so many menus, sub-menus, sub-sub-menus in this game… not even mentioning the amount of clicks and confirmations… It's a bit of a Nintendo nemesis, an "anti-Apple" way of doing things. It's like they live in a world dominated by a Dark Google set to do evil, where searches take 10 seconds, and the three-click rule is a minimum threshold.
• Web design: definitely not 2013-proof, it looks dated, clumsy and unintuitive (granted, LodeStone v2 is a bit better). Still, how many different, parallel, pointless ways to manage our user accounts and subscriptions/codes? From PlayOnline to the MogStation passing by SE accounts, it's always been a disorganised mess. One wonders if they don't actually make things obfuscated on purpose, because it would be hard to make it any less intuitive. Even this forum… clicking on "Settings" to see subscribed threads? Really?! haha. GW2's forums are an artistic masterpiece compared to this.
• Customer support: that's probably the worse, bouncing you from point A to point B to point C, back to point A, hours later nothing is done and you're none the wiser… If one thing, that's where they should really copy Blizzard, who set the golden standard of this industry some 10 years ago…
• Even the way CM's explain things to us… their western teams are admittedly better when they speak for themselves, but when it's a translation from the Japanese CM/devs… oh dear. It's convoluted, rarely to the point, it just never seems "easy" for them to simply expose a problem, let alone its solution. Yoshi-P's much better, I like how the man speaks —always humble and to the point. But that's by no means representative of SE's communication in general —that's one my fields of expertise, and clearly by all business standards, they're just bad at it.
An anecdote: I'm quite confident they don't do it anymore, but until a few years ago, the typical SE way of making FF was to put several teams on the same task, then compare the results and select the best one. Yes, ditching hundreds of man-hours, on a regular basis. How unproductive was that? How frustrating could it have been for their employees? :/
On topic, I think looking at their games coding must really be frightening. I'd wager their netcode is extensive, over-complex, over-bloated, full of unnecessary checks, overly centralised… At least that's how it feels.
Rube Goldberg machine-makers, I'm telling ya!![]()