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Yet a lot of very popular games have been made by individuals or very small teams. Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Terraria, Hollow Knight, Braid, Vampire Survivors,
by PsylentKnight 3y ago
Yet a lot of very popular games have been made by individuals or very small teams. Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Terraria, Hollow Knight, Braid, Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, Papers Please. I think you're right that the majority of games are made by larger teams, but there certainly seems to be something to the focus in vision enabled by smaller teams.
- trealira 3y agoThere's also Cave Story, which came out in 2004. I find it really impressive that the creator made the art, music, music editor, sound effect editor, music format, game engine, and stage editor, with only C++ and the Win32 interface, all while keeping a full time job (although he deliberately picked a low-key job at a printer company so he could work on Cave Story in his free time more). And halfway through, he got married and had kids, which slowed development.
- opyate 3y ago> got married and had kids, which slowed development Story of my life!
- digging 3y agoI think they're arguing that those tend to take their creators more time. I recall that a couple decades ago small teams could publish games in very short time frames, but I could be wrong.
- wincy 3y agoStardew Valley was a guy living in his parents house for four and a half years working full time. Googling says ConcernedApe spent about 10 hours a day, for 4.5 years, and let’s say he took a day off here and there, you’re looking at 10,000-15,000 man hours to deliver Stardew Valley. So that’d be around $500,000-1,000,000 (likely higher) if you had a team working on it, paying them all $100,000 a year, to get that many hours out of them. Making things on a team definitely makes things a lot more expensive!