I worked briefly as in-house game development staff in an entry level position at EA Redwood Shores. I, for one, using the example of EA, am of the opinion that the publisher would be willing to amputate a game's legs if it meant shipping on time.
And that's not good for the developer.
The studio I worked in, formerly just called "EARS - EA Redwood Shores" has been renamed "Visceral Games," but don't let that fool you into thinking it's anything like an independent studio. It is very EA there. It is seeped in EA there. The. Game. Must. Ship. It really amazed me how late in development they were still tooling with basic mechanics, making drastic changes to the jumping and fighting systems and then finding out it broke the level design...
I mean, there are a lot of other problems at EA other than "it's the publisher," but the environment that pressure creates IMHO causes the game to suffer terribly. Everybody there thinks in "features." They get so compartmentalized in their thinking, the sound guy is ONLY worried about sound, the art guy is ONLY worried about art. We'd sit around talking about problems with the game design in such a way you'd think the designers were in a different office on the other side of the planet--not just down the hall. "Maybe they'll get to that, but we're not going to bring it up."
Also, the publisher brings a lot of other baggage like dependence on focus groups. We ran focus groups for months and the feedback was taken very seriously. As a result of the focus groups, every objective point in the game had a blue glowy marker, making the only difference between our game and a Disney ride that in our game, you actually have to push a stick in the direction you want to go.
But fuck, man! We're too busy to question it! They say, "Do this," and we're fucking ON it because it's the difference between four and six hours of sleep tonight. It amazes me the mental gymnastics that people do to justify the hours demanded of the position, for the sake of what's increasingly becoming more and more of a mediocre game the more time we spend overworking on it... "It's what you gotta do." There's this complete tunnel vision of get to the end and everything will be okay.
I know I'm getting onto a slanderous tangent, but I gotta relate this: when I was in college, the studio head of the department I worked in and ultimately the guy who ended up hiring me came and spoke at an event at my school. The most palpable, salient statement I remember him saying was: "Once you accept that it really is all about the shareholder, it gets a lot easier."
It still makes my skin crawl.
The development subsidiaries are just "developers" and just worry about making the game. EA itself then worries about funding, marketing, and so on.
I love this. I'm picturing a Dr. Strangelove-esque war room where instead of a world map, it's a huge EA logo and there's all these different people sitting around. Seated in the middle is "The Decider," who hands down deadlines from above. Around him sits all the different departments, or advisors. There's marketing, there's funding, there's HR, there's development, there's acquisitions, there's property management, and on and on and on. The point here is that development is only one seat at this table. Apt image. I like.