3 ms·

It's probably not much different, but tech is a force multiplier, and we are discussing the tech industry. There are many companies that are oversized. It doesn

It's probably not much different, but tech is a force multiplier, and we are discussing the tech industry. There are many companies that are oversized. It doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one with 8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of that. If your goal is to put out the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster every few years, then that model "works" (or it works for the publisher), but if you want to make a great game, there must be better ways of doing it. You don't reboot a project of that size a little over a year before release without major management issues (this is not even counting the issues that saw Joe Staten and a lot of the old Bungie team leave in the middle of Destiny 1). By all accounts, Destiny 2 is a step backwards from the original. If you've got a working engine and a lot of artists and virtually unlimited resources (as Bungie did), all you've got to do is not fuck things up. But they did. There's an inefficiency there that's preventing good games from being made, and it's not just because things are hard, because they did most of the hard stuff 4 years ago.

badpun 9y ago
> It doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one with 8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of that. There is no sure path to making a great game (or a great anything), so corporate entities cannot depend on it - investors demand predictability. What they CAN depend on though is throwing hundreds of people into making a game of unknown quality (probably mediocre) but with amazing assets, and possibly with an outside IP (a Batman game etc.). So far, this strategy seems to be a valid one.
- fhood 9y ago
  I don't know, some studios seem to have found a formula for consistently producing above average games. Look at From, Bethesda (the developers not the publishers) or Valve. I think it may have a lot to do with giving a medium sized team a long time, rather than a long one a short time.
  - sleepybrett 9y ago
    Bethesda games are uniformly buggy piles of crap that are only fixed after 100s of hours of modded in fixes. Bethesda is only saved as an entity because they embrace modding. Valve is a very bad example, yes they consistently make above average games, however they don't make many and as a dev studio i'm sure valve is deep in the red, they don't make money on their games, they make money on steam.

badpun 9y ago

> It doesn't take 800 people to make a mediocre game. You can make a great one with 8, but many big orgs aren't structured in a way to take advantage of that. There is no sure path to making a great game (or a great anything), so corporate entities cannot depend on it - investors demand predictability. What they CAN depend on though is throwing hundreds of people into making a game of unknown quality (probably mediocre) but with amazing assets, and possibly with an outside IP (a Batman game etc.). So far, this strategy seems to be a valid one.

fhood 9y ago
I don't know, some studios seem to have found a formula for consistently producing above average games. Look at From, Bethesda (the developers not the publishers) or Valve. I think it may have a lot to do with giving a medium sized team a long time, rather than a long one a short time.
- sleepybrett 9y ago
  Bethesda games are uniformly buggy piles of crap that are only fixed after 100s of hours of modded in fixes. Bethesda is only saved as an entity because they embrace modding. Valve is a very bad example, yes they consistently make above average games, however they don't make many and as a dev studio i'm sure valve is deep in the red, they don't make money on their games, they make money on steam.