The article dabbles, but ultimately misses an opportunity to present the piece I want to read: that the ideal shape of a game development team is not unlike an early stage software startup. Remain small, take your time, stay healthy, and put some love into it. Recent years have birthed some real gems from teams of one, three, or single digits. In this category I'd vouch for Hollow Knight, Celeste, Ghost of a Tale, and Crawl. Whether these games make enough money to warrant the investment of their creators versus being at a large company is a worthy debate, but to me it's apparent that we're in a golden age of games made by small groups of visionary creators.
Put another way, there's an exodus from unwieldy large teams that lack responsibility and a sense of craft and ownership.
There's also the problem of 'backlog fatigue'. There's only so much time in life for playing any game, which makes you purchase them much more carefully and for different reasons than you did even five years ago. For me it's much more in the spirit of thanks and support than as a transaction.
>Put another way, there's an exodus from unwieldy large teams that lack responsibility and a sense of craft and ownership.
Is there data for this? EA, Activision, Blizzard, Ubisoft etc seem to be doing fine with massive teams.
The game industry seems to be moving with the rest of the entertainment industry. As technology progresses, the barrier to entry lowers and its easier for small teams to make things.
Sure there are some great independent films but we continue to see Disney behemoth blockbusters breaking records every year or so. I assume there will continue to be room for all types.
Not all projects at EA, Activision, and so on, succeed. The success of these companies are dominated by a few successes, which also tend to be milking existing IPs without much innovation. Even so, the average developer at these companies is still stressed out, because of the Zipf's law nature of project success. That is, it's very likely the project they're working on is not doing so well and will not succeed, and thus, they're overworked, etc.
I'd say there's an exodus much like the web tech industry, a shift from behemoths like Microsoft and IBM to smaller startups like Uber, etc.
For me, the ideal shape of a game development team is to just make games for yourselves. If you find that people love your games, too, then great! If not, then that's great too. Once you start chasing and building on success, the work stops being about scratching your own itch, and moves away from building stuff for yourselves.
Gamasutra could write an article about the ideal shape of a game development team so that all those people out in the industry could learn what they are doing wrong. It sounds like the bdefore is the person who should write that article.
Put another way, there's an exodus from unwieldy large teams that lack responsibility and a sense of craft and ownership.
There's also the problem of 'backlog fatigue'. There's only so much time in life for playing any game, which makes you purchase them much more carefully and for different reasons than you did even five years ago. For me it's much more in the spirit of thanks and support than as a transaction.