Blood of Dawnwalker developer Rebel Wolves isn't looking to increase in size any time soon, and that isn't just in response to the general turbulence happening in the industry right now - it's also a form of creative design.
Talking to GamesRadar+, The Witcher 3 director and Rebel Wolves founder Konrad Tomaszkiewicz explained the benefit of sticking with a relatively small team.
Earlier this year, Dawnwalker creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz told me Rebel Wolves had been employing around 120 people, and his brother Konrad says that number has now crept up to 155.
"I hoped that we could stay with 80 or 90 of us," Konrad Tomaszkiewicz tells us. "But the game is ambitious, and we needed to gather more people."
Still, it's important to Tomaszkiewicz that he remains engaged at all levels of the project and in contact with everyone working on it, and that's the main reason he doesn't want the team to expand any further.
"I don't want to grow because I'm afraid that we will lose the contact [between management and developers]," he says. "I like how it is right now. I like to work with people every day and create with them, not be somewhere and have layers of management just watching the final effect. I want to work with people. Not be a boss, but a leader."
Tomaszkiewicz says the "creative fire" that ignites under direct communication between leadership and ground-level employees is the "most important" aspect in the creation of a game.
"When you set up the goal in a clear way, and you have a reasonable-sized team with whom you can discuss it and agree for some direction, it's easier to keep this spirit and have people motivated.
"And to be honest, what I experience right now is that we are more effective than bigger teams, because in huge teams, you need to manage in a different way, like you have really granular tasks for people ... and here, because we don't have so many people, people feel responsible for some parts of the game, and feel ownership of it. And I think that this is the most important thing."
Blood of Dawnwalker is scheduled to launch on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC sometime in 2026.
The Witcher 3 director says his upcoming RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker isn't "going fully into the vampire fantasy," and expect some Dishonored vibes
