- A former Assassin’s Creed director has criticized the “unsustainable” AAA development model
- Alexandre Amancio says “smaller teams” must become the norm
- He added that larger development teams risk creating “highly variable noise”
Alexandre Amancio, former creative director of Assassin’s Creed franchise, has had some choice words about the AAA industry.
In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, Amancio – who previously served as creative director of Assassin’s Creed Unity and Assassin’s Creed Revelations – says the future of game development must come from smaller teams.
“I don’t think we do. And I don’t think it’s sustainable,” Amancio said of needing teams of hundreds to develop games. “As soon as you get past that, the relationship between management and people working on the game explodes. You start to have a very management-heavy structure: You have people coordinating the people coordinating.”
“Something that a lot of AAA studios mistakenly do,” he continued, “or certainly did in the past, is think you can solve a problem by throwing people at it. But adding people to a problem stagnates the people who were already effective at it. It just creates a lot of variable noise.”
Amancio states the need for “smaller teams” going forward and explains it with an analogy: “The locomotive is the core team, and then you have different sections of the train representing different trades.
“The problem is that each one will go at their own chosen speed. And so the locomotive is pushing in a certain direction at a certain speed, then you have each section trying to either speed up or slow down – and then you’re stuck with the huge train tearing itself apart. So the way I see the future is with a much slimmer train: when you stop at a different section, and when you stop at a different section, and I think it becomes more manageable.”
There is a lot of truth in what Amancio says here. In the AAA space, the size of teams and budgets are sky high, while the time it takes to bring a game from pre-production to release seems to have increased significantly. I’ve definitely shifted to favor smaller budget titles over the years.
And the extra time doesn’t always make for the most polished user experience. Several games from the past decade – perhaps most infamous Cyberpunk 2077 – is launched in broken and buggy states with the intention of fixing and iterating after release. It is a model that the industry probably relies on a little too much.
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