"As one guy at Ubisoft, I had no impact": Assassin's Creed dev turned indie says he was "miserable" as "one cog" in the massive AAA machine

Darenn Keller is, in some ways, the modern games industry personified. As a young French game designer, he landed a "dream" job at Ubisoft working on the Assassin's Creed series, getting his fingerprints on Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Mirage as well as a few games in the Ghost Recon series. There was just one problem: "It wasn't what I'd imagined and I started feeling miserable," Keller said in the Reddit post that first alerted me to his story.

So, as Keller tells me in an interview, he went indie. He left with "about two years of savings and no real plan," and spent those years making a cute survival city builder called Dawnfolk, which has nearly 600 reviews on Steam with a coveted "Overwhelmingly Positive" score. "It didn't go viral, but it sold 26,000 copies and still pays my rent," he said in his post. With another year of support and some Switch port work, Dawnfolk is still ticking along, at least well enough for Keller to pursue another indie game. And, importantly, he's happy with the work.

The work-from-home COVID era impacted Keller's experience with Ubisoft, but he suggests it mainly put it in perspective. "What made me stay was the fact that I was very happy with my team when it was at the office," he explains. When that close collaboration was strained or outright eliminated during COVID, the realities of the job grew heavier.

"I wasn't happy with the creative restrictions that we had, and I wasn't happy with the process that was very heavy," he recalls. "A lot of back-and-forth between the programmer and me, me and my lead, the lead and the director. It was this very vertical process. You always have to validate something. My job was more about convincing. A small part of my job was designing stuff, and the biggest part of my job was convincing other people we should do that, and then actually not doing it because the directors and leads decided otherwise – sometimes for good reasons, but it was very frustrating.

"As one guy at Ubisoft, I had no impact," he says. "I was nobody. I was just one cog, one little thing working on my little feature in that huge game where hundreds of people are working on it. I didn't feel important. I didn't feel like I had control over anything. And I didn't like the fact that most of my life was spent working on stuff where I don't really have any importance."

Keller touches on a few experiences that other ex-AAA developers have discussed, both publicly and in some of my own previous conversations. Being siloed off into a discipline, and then needing to go through a lot of red tape coordinating with people at other levels of a large team just to make anything happen, can feel cumbersome to some. He nails the impact of COVID on some teams: "I wasn't excited because I wasn't seeing anyone." And he echoes a point also made by folks like Super Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai, who said that, in enormous development teams, "there is work that clearly shows your results and work that doesn't."

Some people love AAA. Other developers love the focus and scale you get with AAA – "working on the Colosseum," Blizzard's Chris Kaleiki calls it – but it comes with limitations you don't see as an indie. It also doesn't really come with the stability that big studio jobs could at least pretend to provide before the seismic, continuous layoffs we're seeing today. Right now, it's hard to find a position at all. Ubisoft alone has shed thousands of jobs in recent years.

As an indie, Keller reckons the freedom is worth the uncertainty, and the learning curve that comes with doing everything yourself. It can be "very lonely" working as a solo developer, but "the good thing is I'm not really wasting any time trying to convince anyone or trying to communicate my ideas." Instead, he can just implement his ideas. If they work, great. If they don't, rip 'em out and try something else.

He offers some insight into the processes at Ubisoft, and while it's a limited perspective, it does perk up my ears as the company very publicly struggles to return to its creative (and financial) heyday.

"Sometimes at Ubisoft it's even worse, I would say, because sometimes it's not about the consensus of the team, it's more about what the director is telling you to do, or the decision of the higher-up, basically," he says. "So even if the whole team disagrees with it, you still have to do it because that's the decision. So it was very, very frustrating. But here, it's like I'm the director. It's a bit less frustrating in that sense. I think that's the big advantage."

Earlier this year, former Assassin's Creed creative director Alexandre Amancio argued that AAA studios (not naming names) have a bad habit of throwing more people at production issues when "the future lies in smaller teams."

Ubisoft guts OG Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon studio, laying off 105 developers as Red Storm transitions from game development to tech support.