Yeah, but that's on the management, if those employees pack up their stuff and leave voluntarily/per contract. The top folks are ultimately responsible for the culture they nuture. Many of those original cultures in those long standing legacy studios have been completely undervalued, misunderstood and wrecked.
You got decade long teams/employees that still work together over in Japan. The western AAA has a problem retaining and valuing those folks with actual institutional knowledge. Instead, creatives are viewed nothing more than replaceable cogs in a machinery. That sort perspective is both archaic and self-destructive in the long run. Your IPs are worthless, if the key people who possess the deeper understanding of its founding core principles and philosophy are missing.
Look, i'm not saying game devs and creators should be smothered with praise or necessarily be cast as auteurs. Humility is healthy. However, their creative value and visionary artistry should be acknowledged, if such cases arise. Failing to do so results in self-inflicted harm and likely brain/talent drain which no serious creative business would want in the long run. Things won't change in the west until there's a considerably shake up in leadership who start to rethink and start seeing things this way. As of right now, not many of them don't even trust their own creative workforces or whatever input/feedback they might bring to the table. They kinda have themselves to blame for that though. They drove away their best employees within the recent decade or so ago.
Most western AAA studios have a talent asset management problem. Establishing teams with thousands of game devs, and somehow hoping that will compensate for that, is not the answer.
