This is actually not a problem exclusive to game publishers, from what I've seen. While I tend to be very pro-business, and even pro-big-business, there is a culture and class that have evolved in the last half-century that are trained to do nothing but "manage business." These are the guys who go to a big-name college (often of a politico-economic persuasion that is openly hostile to private enterprise, which always fascinates me that people who graduate from these would WANT to go into business), are talented at networking in the business world, and learned enough about how to structure a contract to make short-term windfalls based on killing geese that lay the golden eggs in order to sell the rare meat once. They then cash in that contract, pat themselves on the back for raising stock values in the short-term, and get hired at the next job with a bigger salary, promising to make the next company equally suddenly-more-successful.
Their reputation never seems to include the mess they leave behind as the company suffers under its new leadership. New leadership which promptly blames the old (correctly), but takes the same sorts of actions to shore things up and take credit for the short-term "savings."
The problem, even amongst the honest ones who think they're doing the company a favor by streamlining costs and cutting fat, etc., is that they don't bother to know the business nor the industry. They know a balance sheet, and they know just enough of the lingo of the actual industry to be dangerous. My grandfather worked for an extremely successful power plant construction company, and was the head guy in charge of about a half dozen plants (ranging from coal to nuclear). They were known for being on time and on budget, consistently, for 70+ years. Then, the son of the owner hired managers from this sort of school of business. They didn't do much harm at first, but they got to the point where a plant was finished being built, and saw that only 80% of the budget had been spent.
They congratulated the company and each other on how efficiently they'd managed it, and proceeded to assign bonuses to themselves based on that 20% of the budget being left.
Problem is, as anybody in the industry could have told them, that the plant construction is only about 80% of the work. There are still six months of extensive and expensive tests to be done. Because of these management types who knew not the industry, for the first time, the company had to take out a loan to finish the job.
These people weren't fired. I don't know the mechanism used to make it not their fault, but they continued to be a drain on the company until a few years ago, when they finally were let go.
From this article, it sounds like the problem with these game publishers is even worse: they have pretensions to artistry. Without being willing to enmesh themselves in the game, and get into the details to appreciate it from the ground up and from the top all the way down into the sub-basements alongside the developer, they seem to think their marketing expertise and money management skills somehow make them better able to design than the experts they're paying to do the design.
What one commenter to that article said is very accurate: the publisher SHOULD be doing marketing for the game the developer makes, not telling the developer to make the game to suit their marketing. The money is, however, flowing the way it should: out of the hands of the incompetent publishers and into other areas. Sadly, it takes time and is not without pain to the wrong people - the developers who get blamed because they signed contracts that for some reason gag them. (Not faulting them; I am sure those reasons are good; I just know I'd want more of a partnership with any investor trying to make "my" game a success, because while I trust people to a point, I don't tend to trust people where my livelihood is at stake. And that might drive me to take less money in what I view as the short run of the next five years in order to make something that I think will stand much more strongly and make me and my partners a lot more money over the next 15.)
At the Phoenix Project, we're working really hard to work together, as a team, with input up and down the chain being as informed as possible about whys as well as what is going on, and why what can and can't be done can and can't be done. Because it is a partnership; even when a foot must come down on an issue (because sometimes, a choice just has to be made, and not by committee), we strive to make sure it comes down with full understanding of everything that choice means. (Admittedly, we're developer AND publisher, at the moment, with no particular prospects for an outside publisher. So we have not experienced the potential outside influence that could create. We will, if we are so fortunate as to get an offer of support from a publisher, be certain to make clear that we are not going to change design decisions on a whim, so...well, we'll see if any offers stay on the table after that. It's not that we'd turn it down nor begrudge a publisher making his money; it's that...well, we all just read that article. It would have to be a partnership, with marketing selling what our game is, not trying to alter it to fit marketing.)