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Masahiro Sakurai has been making games since the early '90s, a period when even the industry's biggest games were often made by just a handful of people. He's seen the industry shift over the course of the decades he spent working on games like Kirby and Super Smash Bros., and it seems he's afraid the massive dev teams of today are making it difficult for individual developers to feel pride in their contributions.
Sakurai was asked about how to enjoy work as a game developer as part of an interview with Japanese outlet 47NEWS, translated by GamesRadar+.
"Talking specifically about game development, it's very satisfying to see the results of your hard work," Sakurai says. "You don't get this when working in a team and it can be really frustrating. For example, when a pixel artist draws a picture by themselves then they of course finished it. But when managing a team, it's often difficult because you have to keep talking about what kind of pixel art is suitable."
An individual's contributions to a project can get lost in a larger team, Sakurai suggests. "There is work that clearly shows your results and work that doesn't," he continues. "It's difficult if you can't find a sense of accomplishment in the final product." The problem, in his eyes, is only getting worse as dev teams get bigger.
"I feel like this is getting more difficult with large-scale games," Sakurai says. "Staff size is rapidly increasing into the hundreds. The sense of fulfillment gained from making something by yourself is different to something made as part of a group. What you are meant to do is also changing."
Sakurai's own career offers a pretty good illustration of his point. The credits list on MobyGames for Kirby's Dream Land, Sakurai's first game, notes just 14 names. The credits list for his most recent game, Kirby Air Riders, lists 908 names. It's easy to see how you can feel a bit anonymous among nearly a thousand co-workers.
And the long-time face of Smash Bros. isn't alone in suggesting that big team sizes can cause problems. Former Assassin's Creed creative director Alexandre Amancio recently said that AAA studios are "mistakenly" throwing people at problems when "the future lies in smaller teams." Even Hideo Kojima thinks a small team like that of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is "ideal."
But there's a big caveat even there, since the specifics of just how many people it took to make Expedition 33 kicked off a pile of capital-D Discourse last year. Even small teams in the modern era may get heavy support from contractor studios and publishing staff, and it might be too late to rebottle that big team genie, even as truly tiny teams continue to punch above their weight.
