- A former Assassin’s Creed director has criticized the “untenable” AAA development model.
- Alexandre Amancio believes that “small teams” must become the norm
- He added that large development teams run the risk of creating “a lot of variable noise.”
Alexandre Amancio, former creative director of Assassin’s Creed franchise, had some choice words about the AAA industry.
In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, Amancio – who was previously creative director of Assassin’s Creed Unit And Assassin’s Creed Revelations – says the future of game development must come from smaller teams.
“I don’t think that’s the case. And I don’t think it’s tenable,” Amancio said of the need for teams of several hundred people to develop games. “As soon as you go beyond that, the ratio of management to the number of people working on the game explodes. You start to have a very top-heavy structure in terms of management: you need people to coordinate people who coordinate.”
“What a lot of AAA studios wrongly do,” he continued, “or certainly have done in the past, is think you can solve a problem by throwing people at it. But adding people to a problem stagnates the people who were already effective on that problem. It just creates a lot of variable noise.”
Amancio highlights the need to create “smaller teams” in the future and explains it with an analogy: “The locomotive is the core team, and then you have different sections of the train that represent different trades.
“The problem is that everyone wants to go at their chosen speed. And so the locomotive is pushing in a certain direction at a certain speed, and then each section is either trying to go faster or trying to brake – and then you get stuck with this huge train tearing itself apart. So the way I see the future is with a much lighter train: when you stop at a station, you pick up some sections, you drop off others, and so on, and I think it becomes more manageable.”
There is a lot of truth in what Amancio says here. In the AAA realm, team sizes and budgets are skyrocketing, while the time it takes to take a game from pre-production to release appears to have increased significantly. Over the years, I’ve certainly favored lower budget titles.
And this extra time doesn’t always translate into the most refined user experience. Several games from the last decade – perhaps the most infamous Cyberpunk 2077 – were released in broken and buggy states with the intention of fixing and iterating after release. It’s a model that the industry probably relies on a little too much.
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