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Former Assassin's Creed creative director for Revelations and Unity, Alexandre Amancio, believes that AAA studios have been "mistakenly" throwing people at game development problems in a way he doesn't think is tenable. Instead, he says the future of development lies in smaller teams.
Game development budgets at AAA studios are larger than ever before, with GTA 6 rumored to have cost more than $1 billion in its creation to date. Sales expectations have blown up alongside the rising costs, with developers suffering the brunt of the losses when games inevitably fail to hit these lofty targets.
A counter movement to this comes from studios like Sandfall Interactive, developer of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which featured a small core team supplemented by work outsourced to numerous studios and developers. Amancio appears to support this development strategy in comments made to GamesIndustry.biz.
When asked if game development needs the huge number of staff members often seen in teams at AAA studios, Amancio responds, "I don't think we do. And I don't think it's tenable." He goes further to explain what goes on behind the scenes.
"Something that a lot of AAA studios mistakenly do, or certainly did in the past, is think that you can solve a problem by throwing people at it," Amancio explains. "But adding people to a problem stagnates the people that were already being efficient on it. It just creates a lot of variable noise."
He believes that the solution to this is smaller core teams supplemented to work outsourced to other teams or studios. "I think the future lies in smaller teams," Amancio says. "I think that there's stuff we can learn from other industries… where you have core teams that are complimented with either outsourcing or with co-dev for specific needs. You get the right crew for the right project at the right time."
