Expanding the team, by contracting or whatever approach they want, is the big mistake that leads a lot of these projects into hell. It draws time away from the core team, by both managing the contractors, and correcting the hundreds of artistic mistakes the contractors are doing. Most historically classic games I enjoyed came from a relatively small team.
They’re not a consistent size over the life of a project. They also contract out a lot of stuff later on to avoid ramping the team up too much.
Look at Epic games, ~5k staff before the recent layoff. The games they developed over the past 10+ years aren’t even AAA production levels.
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 days ago
MurrayL@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Epic isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison with most other studios. They don’t just make games, they develop and support Unreal Engine for both games and film production, they operate EGS, a motion capture studio, ArtStation, Sketchfab, and a dozen other subsidiaries. It’s a huge company.