People who were playing MMOs back in the early to mid 00s can remember when executives who weren't game developers themselves began taking control of these companies, and things only got worse all around. I've always felt that game development companies should be more like a law firm, a medical clinic, architecture collective, fashion house, design firm, etc. where everyone is a practitioner of the same profession and aware of the consequences of decisions only an MBA would make.
If AI and piracy end up destroying the game industry as it is today, I will not care one bit even if games stop being developed except for small shops that actually care about what they're doing.
I am not a businessman, just a gamer.
I find completely absurd that you need a team of 500, and then a team of 7 delivers Hollow Knight. I had way more fun with that game than with any AAA.
Isn't this true for any type of (software) development though? Once the size of an organization grows, everything slows down because processes are formalized, hierarchy is created, etc. This all becomes worse once a company goes public.
When WhatsApp was acquired, they had around 50 employees. By now, it's around 1500. It's still just a messaging app.
I agree, organisational creep can kneecap a lot of different projects.
However it's my (mostly vibes-based) opinion that it impacts software more than most. Imo, disciplines with more stability benefit from knowing how many people are needed for specific roles, and probably don't step on each other's toes so much. Software projects often end up sharing so many interface points between devs. I can't imagine the amount of headaches a 100 strong org would generate when someone breaks CI, lol.
Coupled with the speed at which our industry changes (game engine updates, hardware evolution, new language hotness etc etc), it feels like there's no time to find the 'best' organisational strategy yet.
Every industry is broken, because the overarching economic system is broken. The game industry is one of the first to feel the full effects because it's so optional to the world.
games are closer to art than products or services. the economic system around art has long been broken, imo mostly because of one reason - art generally is difficult to place a monetary value on in isolation: either based on cost to produce (+ value of skills needed), or based on value to end user. in the case of games, the disparity is extremely large. a game can cost upwards of $1m to build, and is worth approx $5 to a gamer. thus the economic model becomes "hit-based". this means large risk upfront, and a lot of "winner take all" in survival. yet like all art, there will be a steady supply of those willing to take abuse to practice the art. this leads to a lot of abusive industry practices.
the main differences afaik from movies & music industry are
- larger percentage of highly technically skilled workers who could make more money in another industry with their skillset
- it's a younger industry and thus has slightly less entrenched "this is just how things are done" cultural energy, allowing such articles to exist, fewer nepo-babies in control positions, etc
but as it has grown and every other entertainment industry has been getting their fingers in the pie, it has increasingly been adopting those toxic practices that have long existed in art under capitalism
Seems like there have been too many AAA flops, to the point where you can't really say that the launch week of a new title is going to be all that important.
It used to be that a big release was reliably interesting with everyone figuring out how to play, and a bit more emergent chaos. Few new titles have captured this. Either they are overly sterile, or buggy live service titles with no real reason to engage at day one.
Possible that the size of the teams is part of the problem, but if the industry needs to drop from 500 man to 100 man teams, I can't imagine how the industry will be healthy during that.
I don't believe dropping to 100‑man teams will be enough.
A big problem is that we now have such big budgets that they need approval higher up, and worse, you end up looking like a fool when your project fails. That is still the case with 100-man teams.
This is not necessarily a terrible situation to be in if it were a startup situation where you could count on having 90% failures and the winner making the whole bucket worth it and people knew and accepted that.
But outside Sand Hill Road nobody gets that, so the strategy is to play it safe, safe, and safe, and then you end up with boring games.
It also doesn't help that it used to be that gamers would reliably update every couple of years, so graphics cards and processes would get faster, and you could make a generic shoot‑'em‑up game that was significantly better than the previous shoot‑'em‑up just because you now had more to work with.
Computers have actually increased in price, so much so that no one buys to update their computers. And at the same time, you need permission from an extremely high level to make games, so you can only make games that are very safe.
Meanwhile, the golden age of indie games is out there. It's never been easier to make your creative game and it's never been easier to find an audience for it.
As a result, there are more games than ever on Steam, and those fun games can last a lot longer because they don't have the marketing budget, so there's no big, immediate launch-month splat window. People will find them on social media, watch their favourite streamers play them etc.
Until we get to a point where games are created by studios who accept that 90% of them will fail, we are going to have interesting games from non‑studios.
That leaves a hole in the options for game development, though. Where are we with games that can be developed by 50 people but not by four? Those games do not have a home right no; They are too risky and uninteresting for the big guys, and they are out of scope for the independent.
The entire game-development business is being torn apart and remodeled by AI development right now. It is very likely that the big companies may never be able to make a game with 500 people.
Many games that were previously too large and required too many people to be feasible for indie developers are now very feasible for them. It's also quite possible that exclusives, such as for PlayStation, will very quickly disappear due to widespread piracy aided by AI powered decompiling. The future is extremely hard to predict at present, even more so than for non-gaming segments of the industry.
The AAA industry is broken. But there is nothing to repair. The indie industry will continue telling new stories without it. Every gamer will have no shortage of finding games to play. The only problem is if your goal is to employ hundreds or thousands of people and extract money from your audience. If you're in the business of making games and entertaining people, you're already just fine.
This. We are currently in the new golden era of Indie games or even gaming in general.
You can’t plan success anymore with marketing and market research.
But you can succeed spectacularly with genuinely good games like Balatro or Slay the Spire.
The US game industry has been broken for decade+, since all those gates. Now just free money ran out.
Start producing games players want, and you will do just fine! And do not tell your customers, how much you hate them! Even better: do not hate your customers!
I recently started playing Expedition 33 and was impressed right away by the quality just in the first 10 minutes, hours later and the game just gets better.
I count 32 people on their team photo + the dog, and even this seems like a somewhat sizable number of people to manage. When I see news of these lay-offs it’s terrible for those people but at the end of the day I feel like those companies never should have reached those numbers. I fear for Larian
One big problem is that good GPUs are not getting cheaper. They are both getting more expensive and becoming rarer at the consumer level, because everyone is on laptops of phones. As Sweeney points out, the game industry can't coast on improving hardware performance.
Epic is in the over-optimization business. With enough complexity, you can get performance up, at a high development cost. The results are truly impressive. See a GTA VI trailer.[1]
The cost is high. Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion.
That's 3x the cost of the most expensive movie ever made. It's more than the Super Bowl.
It will be interesting to see if AI generation can bring costs down. There's endless
low-end AI crap, but here's a animation to watch - Kono Express.[1]. This was done by an animator Disney made the mistake of laying off.
So he's in the process of replacing Disney Animation. He's turning out about half an hour of finished material per month, all by himself. It's up to Hollywood animation standards. He's combined Unreal Engine and AI to do this. Do we really need Disney's high-cost operation any more?
It blows my mind that Sweeney thinks the solution is to make an ecosystem game. First of all, that's not easy to do. Second, the fact that all the AAA studios are trying to do that sort of thing is exactly why AAA games suck! Rather than trying to make cool games that are fun to play, they are trying to make slop that is addictive and keeps you spending money. Turns out that even people who are down for that sort of game don't need more than one (and they already have that one), whereas all kinds of people would be happy to buy something unique and fun.
I guess maybe it shouldn't surprise me that someone in his position advocates for "do the thing which is killing the industry, but do it even harder". But it really did catch me off guard.
I'm not convinced that Sweeney is being altruistic, but there are some upsides to attempting an ecosystem. It pushes standards (hopefully open) forward and allows smaller teams to develop games without having to reinvent all of the non-game infrastructure that many people expect from games these days.
You cannot take Sweeney at face value. Like any good salesman, his job is to manufacture demand for his own product, and like any good salesman, he doesn't actually believe what he's saying, because, like any good salesman, he doesn't let truth get in the way of profit.
Guy made $150,000 from the precursor game to Ultima… at 19 years old, in 1980.
The 1980s were full of kids becoming thousandaires by making games from their bedrooms after school, in just a few weeks or months at most..
Can we bring that back somehow?
Those early devs had almost no "prior art" to draw from, just the imagination in their heads.
And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now.
Now, we have infinitely easier tools, an infinite amount of inspiration, and there is a lot of incredible creativity in the indie game scene, but the discoverability seems worse:
The most popular platforms, iOS, Android, consoles, are notoriously difficult to get a game on and make money from, especially for a kid.
On the other hand there's too much low-effort slop to sift through (which was also a problem during the 1980s)
Seems like what we need most is better discoverability, filtering, and low-friction monetization that isn't ads..
You can't.
People who were playing MMOs back in the early to mid 00s can remember when executives who weren't game developers themselves began taking control of these companies, and things only got worse all around. I've always felt that game development companies should be more like a law firm, a medical clinic, architecture collective, fashion house, design firm, etc. where everyone is a practitioner of the same profession and aware of the consequences of decisions only an MBA would make.
If AI and piracy end up destroying the game industry as it is today, I will not care one bit even if games stop being developed except for small shops that actually care about what they're doing.
I am not a businessman, just a gamer. I find completely absurd that you need a team of 500, and then a team of 7 delivers Hollow Knight. I had way more fun with that game than with any AAA.
If you look at a game like elden ring I’m not surprised that hundreds of people were involved. It would be sad if we wouldn’t have games like that.
You need the team of 500 to do the "telemetry" and microtransactions parts.
The game industry has merged with the gaming industry.
We need to stop calling gambling gaming. And stop calling internet gambling/betting igaming.
Can't agree more. We need more "betting" societal stigma.
Quern was 4 people and Forgotten City was just a handful as well.
Isn't this true for any type of (software) development though? Once the size of an organization grows, everything slows down because processes are formalized, hierarchy is created, etc. This all becomes worse once a company goes public.
When WhatsApp was acquired, they had around 50 employees. By now, it's around 1500. It's still just a messaging app.
I agree, organisational creep can kneecap a lot of different projects.
However it's my (mostly vibes-based) opinion that it impacts software more than most. Imo, disciplines with more stability benefit from knowing how many people are needed for specific roles, and probably don't step on each other's toes so much. Software projects often end up sharing so many interface points between devs. I can't imagine the amount of headaches a 100 strong org would generate when someone breaks CI, lol.
Coupled with the speed at which our industry changes (game engine updates, hardware evolution, new language hotness etc etc), it feels like there's no time to find the 'best' organisational strategy yet.
Every industry is broken, because the overarching economic system is broken. The game industry is one of the first to feel the full effects because it's so optional to the world.
How is the economic system broken?
games are closer to art than products or services. the economic system around art has long been broken, imo mostly because of one reason - art generally is difficult to place a monetary value on in isolation: either based on cost to produce (+ value of skills needed), or based on value to end user. in the case of games, the disparity is extremely large. a game can cost upwards of $1m to build, and is worth approx $5 to a gamer. thus the economic model becomes "hit-based". this means large risk upfront, and a lot of "winner take all" in survival. yet like all art, there will be a steady supply of those willing to take abuse to practice the art. this leads to a lot of abusive industry practices.
the main differences afaik from movies & music industry are
- larger percentage of highly technically skilled workers who could make more money in another industry with their skillset
- it's a younger industry and thus has slightly less entrenched "this is just how things are done" cultural energy, allowing such articles to exist, fewer nepo-babies in control positions, etc
but as it has grown and every other entertainment industry has been getting their fingers in the pie, it has increasingly been adopting those toxic practices that have long existed in art under capitalism
well, for one, the top 10% households drive most discretionary consumption in the US because the other 90% are broke.
Wealth and consumption follow a power law. That's not broken.
The US dollar has lost 20% of value over the past 5 years. You can print money out of thin air, but you can't print industrial output (or good games).
That's pretty near to as intended. Inflation doesn't mean an economy is broken.
Oh, well. I might have a bridge to sell you. :D
Seems like there have been too many AAA flops, to the point where you can't really say that the launch week of a new title is going to be all that important.
It used to be that a big release was reliably interesting with everyone figuring out how to play, and a bit more emergent chaos. Few new titles have captured this. Either they are overly sterile, or buggy live service titles with no real reason to engage at day one.
Possible that the size of the teams is part of the problem, but if the industry needs to drop from 500 man to 100 man teams, I can't imagine how the industry will be healthy during that.
because they're all becoming the same. Just like cars pretty much have the same shape nowadays
I don't believe dropping to 100‑man teams will be enough.
A big problem is that we now have such big budgets that they need approval higher up, and worse, you end up looking like a fool when your project fails. That is still the case with 100-man teams.
This is not necessarily a terrible situation to be in if it were a startup situation where you could count on having 90% failures and the winner making the whole bucket worth it and people knew and accepted that.
But outside Sand Hill Road nobody gets that, so the strategy is to play it safe, safe, and safe, and then you end up with boring games.
It also doesn't help that it used to be that gamers would reliably update every couple of years, so graphics cards and processes would get faster, and you could make a generic shoot‑'em‑up game that was significantly better than the previous shoot‑'em‑up just because you now had more to work with.
Computers have actually increased in price, so much so that no one buys to update their computers. And at the same time, you need permission from an extremely high level to make games, so you can only make games that are very safe.
Meanwhile, the golden age of indie games is out there. It's never been easier to make your creative game and it's never been easier to find an audience for it.
As a result, there are more games than ever on Steam, and those fun games can last a lot longer because they don't have the marketing budget, so there's no big, immediate launch-month splat window. People will find them on social media, watch their favourite streamers play them etc.
Until we get to a point where games are created by studios who accept that 90% of them will fail, we are going to have interesting games from non‑studios.
That leaves a hole in the options for game development, though. Where are we with games that can be developed by 50 people but not by four? Those games do not have a home right no; They are too risky and uninteresting for the big guys, and they are out of scope for the independent.
The entire game-development business is being torn apart and remodeled by AI development right now. It is very likely that the big companies may never be able to make a game with 500 people.
Many games that were previously too large and required too many people to be feasible for indie developers are now very feasible for them. It's also quite possible that exclusives, such as for PlayStation, will very quickly disappear due to widespread piracy aided by AI powered decompiling. The future is extremely hard to predict at present, even more so than for non-gaming segments of the industry.
software industry get "leaner" with AI, I don't see game industry is any different
The AAA industry is broken. But there is nothing to repair. The indie industry will continue telling new stories without it. Every gamer will have no shortage of finding games to play. The only problem is if your goal is to employ hundreds or thousands of people and extract money from your audience. If you're in the business of making games and entertaining people, you're already just fine.
This. We are currently in the new golden era of Indie games or even gaming in general. You can’t plan success anymore with marketing and market research.
But you can succeed spectacularly with genuinely good games like Balatro or Slay the Spire.
The US game industry has been broken for decade+, since all those gates. Now just free money ran out.
Start producing games players want, and you will do just fine! And do not tell your customers, how much you hate them! Even better: do not hate your customers!
Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 probably kept all those gamers too busy for too long. Same will happen with GTA VI.
It feels like whole business tries to become "the ultimate middle man".
Grabbing largest profits possible, but all risks on producers.
For clients there are two problems. Lack of people that steer industry in good direction long term, and everything works until it doesn't.
I recently started playing Expedition 33 and was impressed right away by the quality just in the first 10 minutes, hours later and the game just gets better.
I count 32 people on their team photo + the dog, and even this seems like a somewhat sizable number of people to manage. When I see news of these lay-offs it’s terrible for those people but at the end of the day I feel like those companies never should have reached those numbers. I fear for Larian
One big problem is that good GPUs are not getting cheaper. They are both getting more expensive and becoming rarer at the consumer level, because everyone is on laptops of phones. As Sweeney points out, the game industry can't coast on improving hardware performance.
Epic is in the over-optimization business. With enough complexity, you can get performance up, at a high development cost. The results are truly impressive. See a GTA VI trailer.[1] The cost is high. Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion. That's 3x the cost of the most expensive movie ever made. It's more than the Super Bowl.
It will be interesting to see if AI generation can bring costs down. There's endless low-end AI crap, but here's a animation to watch - Kono Express.[1]. This was done by an animator Disney made the mistake of laying off. So he's in the process of replacing Disney Animation. He's turning out about half an hour of finished material per month, all by himself. It's up to Hollywood animation standards. He's combined Unreal Engine and AI to do this. Do we really need Disney's high-cost operation any more?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFwB6gZLRmc
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdfJiKACxx4
> Development cost for that game was around US $1.5 billion.
but is it making the game any better? Or is it just gold plating?
Not just gold, it's platinum plating. But no, the underlying gameplay of the series has barely changed at all since GTA 3 in 2001.
It blows my mind that Sweeney thinks the solution is to make an ecosystem game. First of all, that's not easy to do. Second, the fact that all the AAA studios are trying to do that sort of thing is exactly why AAA games suck! Rather than trying to make cool games that are fun to play, they are trying to make slop that is addictive and keeps you spending money. Turns out that even people who are down for that sort of game don't need more than one (and they already have that one), whereas all kinds of people would be happy to buy something unique and fun.
I guess maybe it shouldn't surprise me that someone in his position advocates for "do the thing which is killing the industry, but do it even harder". But it really did catch me off guard.
I'm not convinced that Sweeney is being altruistic, but there are some upsides to attempting an ecosystem. It pushes standards (hopefully open) forward and allows smaller teams to develop games without having to reinvent all of the non-game infrastructure that many people expect from games these days.
You cannot take Sweeney at face value. Like any good salesman, his job is to manufacture demand for his own product, and like any good salesman, he doesn't actually believe what he's saying, because, like any good salesman, he doesn't let truth get in the way of profit.
Just saw this very recent interview with Richard Garriott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m60SbCPdfQI
Guy made $150,000 from the precursor game to Ultima… at 19 years old, in 1980.
The 1980s were full of kids becoming thousandaires by making games from their bedrooms after school, in just a few weeks or months at most..
Can we bring that back somehow?
Those early devs had almost no "prior art" to draw from, just the imagination in their heads.
And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now.
Now, we have infinitely easier tools, an infinite amount of inspiration, and there is a lot of incredible creativity in the indie game scene, but the discoverability seems worse:
The most popular platforms, iOS, Android, consoles, are notoriously difficult to get a game on and make money from, especially for a kid.
On the other hand there's too much low-effort slop to sift through (which was also a problem during the 1980s)
Seems like what we need most is better discoverability, filtering, and low-friction monetization that isn't ads..
> Can we bring that back somehow?
All the tools are there, and lots of people are doing it already. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from "bringing that back".
The problem with the game industry is, honestly, that everyone wants to break into it.
The game industry is genuinely terrible, starting with low pay and brutal working hours, but it's interesting and lets you do a lot of fun things.
Because everyone wants to do it, there are plenty of people willing to put up with somewhat lower pay.
Yeah, I agree with that take. It’s the fashion industry of computers. People will bend over backwards just to be a part of it.