It has never been easier to make a game. You just cannot imagine anything besides the biggest, most bestest game evarrr. You keep hiring more people - that makes it take longer.
Small teams have the requirement and the ability to look at a proposed feature and go “nope, can’t.” And then the game ships without that and nobody fucking cares. It’s not half-implemented and unpolished, and it didn’t take seven months of tweaking, and the audience does not notice its absence because the game was built around not having it.
Big teams suffer scope creep, plan ages to do everything, then need even more time to gouge out whichever big ideas completely flopped. Meanwhile the market has moved on. Even the parts that work reflect trends from when developed began. Congratulations! You’ve spent one hundred million dollars and seven entire years to make a bloated product that is deeply okay and now needs to sell eight zillion copies to break even. Just in time for a ravenous money-robot like Embracer to fire you all. They made a bad call in a completely unrelated industry, but sacrificing your perfectly successful company will make them money somehow. Maybe they’ll pump that into one of the hot new independent studios that ships more than once per decade.
Stop spending so much money, you dumb bastards.
It has never been easier to make a game. You just cannot imagine anything besides the biggest, most bestest game evarrr. You keep hiring more people - that makes it take longer.
Small teams have the requirement and the ability to look at a proposed feature and go “nope, can’t.” And then the game ships without that and nobody fucking cares. It’s not half-implemented and unpolished, and it didn’t take seven months of tweaking, and the audience does not notice its absence because the game was built around not having it.
Big teams suffer scope creep, plan ages to do everything, then need even more time to gouge out whichever big ideas completely flopped. Meanwhile the market has moved on. Even the parts that work reflect trends from when developed began. Congratulations! You’ve spent one hundred million dollars and seven entire years to make a bloated product that is deeply okay and now needs to sell eight zillion copies to break even. Just in time for a ravenous money-robot like Embracer to fire you all. They made a bad call in a completely unrelated industry, but sacrificing your perfectly successful company will make them money somehow. Maybe they’ll pump that into one of the hot new independent studios that ships more than once per decade.