Most of those devs are probably freelancers or from hired studios doing esoteric work. It’s still crazy to see these numbers when most of the games I play are indie and have tiny credit listings. 450 people could make at least ten of the games I play.
Comment on Over 450 Diablo developers at Blizzard have unionized
overload@sopuli.xyz 1 day agoCrazy that AAA games take that many developers
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 1 day ago
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I’m still surprised when I see 50+ on some indie games.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
As a bit of a thought exercise, I went through every mainline GTA game using that website to get an idea of each title’s respective headcount:
So while the general headcount growth over time tends to track, as each generation of platform requires more and more people to churn out higher fidelity content, I can’t help but wonder what portion of that headcount is just there to churn out micro transaction and Games-as-a-Service garbage.
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
A good number of that is 3D artists. Try making a highly detailed 3D model in Blender. Now imagine a game like GTA V has thousands of those, but even more detailed. This is one of the major reasons why AAA are taking longer and longer to produce. At the same time, game systems and mechanics are simplified to cut costs.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Well the other thing is that design work doesn’t scale the way art does. You can’t throw 1000 game designers at a project and expect them to create a coherent game design.
So you end up with one or a small team of game designers and they need to get the major parts of the design done early since everyone else follows from that. This leaves you with so little room for experimentation that you end up with a cookie cutter game design.