There is a balance. I used to work in the animation industry. Mostly at John K's studio Spümcø. I had a ringside seat for the debacle that was "Ren & Stimpy Ad

There is a balance. I used to work in the animation industry. Mostly at John K's studio Spümcø. I had a ringside seat for the debacle that was "Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon". All of the things I'd heard about on the original production of Ren and Stimpy played out before my eyes. Basically I got to see what happens when the whole production is run by an obsessive perfectionist who has nobody who can say "no, we can't afford to do this". And if you look at a ton of the animation out there, you can see the other side of this: studios run by people who only see the bottom line, who focus group the life out of everything halfway interesting and only ever deliver generic content. But when you get enough people in management who actually care about making good work, something can start to happen. Fred Seibert, for instance - he ran the "What A Cartoon!" incubator series at Cartoon Network, "Oh yeah! Cartoons" at Nickelodeon, and now runs a Youtube channel called Frederator. Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, and Adventure Time all came out of these various incubators. He's built space after space to find talented young cartoonists and give them more enough rope to hang themselves. Or to make something amazing. You don't just need professional management. You need management who gives a fuck about making good stuff, and can negotiate with the obsessed lunatics who actually make the things when they start to get overambitious. You need management that is willing to make space to experiment and take risks with small projects. There seem to be pockets of this in video games right now. Sony's been funding a lot of little weird things; Microsoft's had its hands in a few too. But then there are also titans like EA who buy up quirky Popcaps and turn all their gorgeous, laid-back games into IAP orgies.