He highlights the biggest mistake made by the industry giants. „The future belongs to smaller teams,” says director of Assassin's Creed: Unity
The former director of Assassin's Creed said that studios are making the mistake of hiring too many employees. In his opinion, the game industry should follow the example of the film industry.
Lately, in the gaming world, it's been interesting to see big studio games not doing so hot, while mid-budget and indie games are getting all the attention. Some developers believe that AAA games are currently in decline, and now a former director of Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Revelations has expressed a similar opinion.
"The future lies in smaller teams"
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Alexandre Amancio stated that maintaining stability and innovation with large teams is extremely difficult. Once the team grows past a hundred people, it starts to rely heavily on management, which means you'll need to hire more folks for the right roles. According to Amancio, this is a mistake.
Something that a lot of AAA studios mistakenly do, or certainly did in the past, is think that you can solve a problem by throwing people at it. But adding people to a problem stagnates the people that were already being efficient on it. It just creates a lot of variable noise.
So I think the future lies in smaller teams.
The developer also proposed a solution involving operating more in the style of the film industry. Teams would gather to work on a specific project rather than being maintained as a cohesive studio all the time.
Since its inception, I think that the gaming industry has treated itself as being part of the software industry, but it is kind of a weird hybrid. I think the future lies in taking that learning from the film industry, where you have core teams that are complimented with either outsourcing or with co-dev for specific needs. You get the right crew for the right project at the right time.
In a sense, this is already happening, as it is not uncommon for project completions to involve layoffs to cut costs. Outsourcing is also quite common—not only among large teams, as elements created by external developers include titles like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Balatro.
A cooperative game instead of Unity
Amancio also shared an interesting tidbit related to working on Assassin’s Creed: Unity. He revealed that at that time, two projects were being developed in parallel: a traditional installment of the series set during the French Revolution and a co-op game.
We found a clever way of hiding a character creation system within Assassin's Creed. Instead of having just one blood ancestor in the Animus, it's a database of millions of people, and you're searching for an ancestor. So the more you describe that ancestor, the more it reduces the search until you find a match.
At some point, the team had to pick which game to keep working on, and they ended up going with the one that was more popular with people. Amancio admitted that he still somewhat regrets not choosing differently.
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Author: Martin Bukowski
Graduate of Electronics and Telecommunications at the Gdańsk University of Technology, who decided to dedicate his life to video games. In his childhood, he would get lost in the Gothic's Valley of Mines and "grind for gold" in League of Legends. Twenty years later, games still entertain him just as much. Today, he considers the Persona series and soulslike titles from From Software as his favorite games. He avoids consoles, and a special place in his heart is reserved for PC. In his spare time, he works as a translator, is creating his first game, or spends time watching movies and series (mainly animated ones).
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