Video Game Veterans Are Abandoning Big Studios For Smaller Teams

Growing numbers of veteran video game developers are leaving large studios to work on smaller projects, citing bureaucratic burnout and creative constraints at major publishers. Nate Purkeypile, former lead artist on Bethesda's "Starfield," quit in 2021 after facing up to 20 meetings weekly coordinating with a 400-person team across four offices. He has since released "The Axis Unseen," a horror game he developed solo.

The trend, reported by Bloomberg, coincides with ballooning development costs in the industry. Sony's "Uncharted 2" cost $20 million in 2009, while 2020's "The Last of Us: Part 2" exceeded $200 million. "Small studios are not burdened by stockholder expectations," Renee Gittins, International Game Developers Association board chair, told the publication. They're "more nimble, [and] able to take greater risks." Recent indie successes like "Balatro" and "Animal Well," created by solo developers, have also demonstrated the commercial viability of smaller productions.

Dysfunctional

[fluffernutter]

I think this is no different than the dysfunctional way most companies work.. It is difficult to keep doing what you are passionate about forever, because in every company it is considered a 'move up' to move to a position where you are watching over other people doing the work instead of doing the work. If you don't 'move up' in a certain amount of time you are viewed as less useful.

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[gweihir]

I never understood why that is considered a move up. I always thought of it as a "your tech skills suck, try something else" move. To be fair, I have met a few (not many) excellent technical managers.

Sure there's that

[i kan reed]

But there's also the fact that a third of the industry got laid off.

There's thousands of free agents with excellent skills just waiting for a chance to join an indie studio.

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[Baron_Yam]

Yep. There are a lot of recently unemployed game devs who are probably not ready / desperate enough to try and find other ways to market their skills just yet.

They know how to make games, it's still their best bet for making a living and likely still their career preference too.

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[Moryath]

Also the fact that companies like Sony and Microsoft want to staff their teams with H1-B Slaves and Indian Crap-Programmers, so the real experienced devs have no choice but to form their own indie studios.

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[KlomDark]

Don Jr, Eric, and Ivanka? That DEI?

Re: Big Corporations == DEI HR Hell games (and mov

[paul_engr]

It must be so tough living in society with so much angst. How do you manage?

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[Darinbob]

His mom brings his meds down to the basement in the morning, but some days she forgets.

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[gtall]

Aren't you supposed to be out there eating Haitian cats, or am I misremembering your marching orders?

This is a win all around, really...

[King_TJ]

From the dawn of the video game revolution, the best games usually came from small teams. (Some of the early 80's coin-up arcade hits came from pinball machine manufacturers who spun off small teams to try building an arcade game title. And the most popular adventure games on personal computers were usually done by publishers like Sierra Online, who started with just a married couple working from their house.)

The state of today's video game industry is approaching it far more like making a Hollywood movie,

Re: This is a win all around, really...

[PFritz21]

Or a kid is asked to repurpose arcade cabinets for a less successful project and given free rein to come up with a concept. Thatâ(TM)s how we got Nintendo and âoeDonkey Kongâ. Theyâ(TM)re worth billions forty years later, and helped to revive a dying industry with home consoles in North America.

Re:This is a win all around, really...

[Zarhan]

From the dawn of the video game revolution, the best games usually came from small teams

This is all well and good, but the problem is these days that there's gazillion indie games available on Steam or GOG or itch.io, that you really cannot guess which is good.

I have only installed stuff like FTL or Shadowrun Returns (the whole series, Dragonfall is best) *after* they became widely acclaimed.

Way back when Ken and Roberta started out they had much smaller field. "Indies" where publishing (BASIC or assembly) program listings in magazines, and even those had a bit of editorial control.

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[King_TJ]

I get it... but we're ALSO stuck in kind of a rut where most of what people collectively think is "good" are just re-hashes of the same relative few game concepts. How many Battlefield or Call of Duty games do we need, for example? And as good a franchise as it is? How many more Fallouts will keep getting made around the same core concept?

If anything, we're just going to need some better video game review sites to point people to the ones that are really good?

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[JamesTRexx]

Rehashes indeed, and not challenging in my opinion when it comes to the few first person shooters I've looked at. Mods only take it so far.
I'd like to see an FPS where realistic graphics is not the priority but enough performance to fill a scene with characters without stuttering or disappearing after dying and going out of view (see Far Cry x).
And a difficulty grade that doesn't mean a difference in damage, but makes the enemy actually move in a smarter (or dumber as they do now) way. They don't walk aroun

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[Darinbob]

But the big games get reviewed and fans are dumping on them because they're still not as good as movies. Criticisms about how characters look abound, voice acting is criticized, character or face animations are dumped on, it's all very brutal. It's a trend to be negative or hostile on social media or youtube about big games. So the message being sent back to the studios is: you should have spent even MORE money.

Games have gotten too popular

[JThundley]

Gaming has gotten too popular and therefor more corporate. I'm just glad I have the option of going to non-chain locally owned restaurants while the masses go to McDonalds if you know what I mean.

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[Darinbob]

It's the opposite though. McDonald's is inexpensive and low quality. The independent restaurants may have very expensive ingredients prepared by high paid chefs. Whereas indie games very distinctly are making shortcuts because they don't have the budgets - some are pixelated because they have to be and not because they're being ironically retro.

AAA studios are in a bind because the fans demand perfection. Add voice acting for the protagonist in an RPG then the community bitches because that's not how th

Unsurprising

[paul_engr]

How games should be developed: gamers make games. Anybody who isn't feeding them diet coke, pizza or keeping the office from catching on fire, if there is an office, is superfluous.

Good

[gweihir]

While the things smaller studios do are not as visually stunning (wears off in an hour or so), they have produced some pretty great games. Things like Factorio or Oxygen Not Included come to mind for me. In the end what counts is not presentation, but fun. Too many big studios seem to have forgotten that. BG3 is somewhere in the middle on team size and shows that larger teams can perform exceptionally well, it is just that most do not.

again?

[snowshovelboy]

Is this new or did bloomberg.com just now notice a trend that has been going on for like 25 years.