A paraphrased quote I faintly remember from one of the original creators of Rogue(which, of course, passed through a number of different hands before it became

A paraphrased quote I faintly remember from one of the original creators of Rogue(which, of course, passed through a number of different hands before it became the game we know today): "It's easy to make a new kind of game, it's much harder to make an existing game better." It's a deceptively simple piece of wisdom, but it goes a long way to explaining some of the outcomes of the business. AAA-scale development is riddled with stories of brute forced effort on every front - attempts to chase after quality without being able to define it in positive terms, resulting in dozens of retakes on the same concept. Smaller studios, being less encumbered by the usual organizational overheads, are much better prepared to plan and focus themselves exclusively around a single facet of the work and align all the other pieces around that. At the extreme end you get the solo developer, who generally produces something radically imbalanced and unmarketable, but with just a few team members, major issues get smoothed out. The risk that comes with any team change is that things don't get smoothed out in quite the same way as before - the conversations, timelines, and conventions shift around, so the pieces all get resolved slightly differently with tangible impacts on the result. Rob Pardo working on World of Warcraft, Rob Pardo working on Hearthstone, and Rob Pardo at his new venture all might as well be different designers. What will make the difference is in whether the team coordinates well. For an example of how it can flop, see Flagship Studios[0]. [0] http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3169356 http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3169356