It’s no secret that major studios are struggling to put out successful games. Between increasing development turnarounds, ballooning budgets, cancellations and mass layoffs, the industry is finding it harder to reliably bring projects to conclusion, leading to fewer blockbusters coming out each year.Various reasons have been aired for these problems, ranging from overeager profit chasing, to mismanagement and the malign influence of private equity, alongside broader market influences like audiences playing fewer new games. But former Assassin’s Creed director Alexandre Amancio thinks the problems are more fundamental than these influences. Indeed, he believes they go right to the heart of how gaming’s biggest studios are currently structured.Speaking to GamesIndustry, Amancio, who directed both Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, said that the sheer size of modern development teams makes both sustainability and innovation extremely difficult:”There’s this theory that says whenever humans create something that surpasses a hundred people, it completely changes the dynamic of it. As soon as you surpass that, the ratio of management to people working on the game explodes. You start having a very management-heavy structure: You need to have people to coordinate the people coordinating.”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 who were already being efficient on it. It just creates a lot of variable noise.”So I think the future lies in smaller teams.”(Image credit:…
