Are there any examples of creatives being given huge amounts of control and not completely fucking it up, though?
Star Citizen seems like a good game to point the finger at, but even getting out of "indies" you have Kojima spending 5 years and 80 million dollars on what basically is a glorified tech demo and ultimately pushed Konami out of the games space for over half a decade now.
There are some other examples where it goes wrong in some almost equally funny ways (LA Noire if anything is lucky to be as good and sucessful as it was). Brutal Legend, which was advertised seemingly as a action adventure game set in a heavy metal world which sounded really awesome if you enjoy heavy metal as an look and genre, EA effectively let good ol' Tim Schaffer do what he wanted. He got all his licensed music like its a GTA game, he got Ozzy Osbourne of all people to voice in it among other figure heads in metal, he got his pretty good cutscenes for the time (this was late 2000s), he got basically everything and went over budget without his project getting canned. It was a disaster in the end, because the core gameplay made no sense for the look of the game and it was so obvious the suits didn't believe in this idea because it was stupid.
Now guess what genre the core gameplay was? A console RTS game ala Star Craft. That's right, let's make a heavy metal game where the main character has a big epic battle axe, demon wings, and a guitar that is basically a magic wand for how much it does and...make it an RTS...on the 360/PS3. Where the focus is on pvp and the single player is effectively a giant tutorial.
All because of "muh vision".
Balan Wonderworld was also an example as apparently no one told Yuji Naka that one button platformers went out of style about 20 years ago.
What I've learned from these stories is that creatives are almost more retarded at solely running huge AAA projects then the suits, the only reason we don't see these stories more is because suits naturally have final say in how much power creatives get and naturally they lean towards ensuring they have power more often then that.
I think it is only in 1 man or really small team projects that this works, because limitations puts a natural strain on creativity freedom that can (sometimes) cull out over ambition. Their are some quite good passion projects in that scope of game development, but when given AAA budgets these people suck at managing projects without suits. It is like they think money and project time is infinite.
