Former Assassin’s Creed director Alexandre Amancio has shared his thoughts about AAA development, suggesting we need “smaller teams” and admitting that big-budget developers cannot “solve a problem by throwing people at it”.
In an interview with our sister site GamesIndustry.biz, Amancio – who currently works at FunPlus – talked frankly about his time at Ubisoft, suggesting it’s not “tenable” to keep making bigger and bigger games with more and more people.
“There’s this theory that says that 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,” he said.
“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 that were already being efficient on it. It just creates a lot of variable noise.
“So I think the future lies in smaller teams.”
Amancio then reflected on how the film industry has “coalesced” into smaller, core teams, where each crew is “built for that project, it’s a temporary crew”, but gaming is different from films as in projects change and evolve over time, whilst in the film industry, “you have a script, it’s solid, and then you just go and shoot it”.
“Since its inception, I think that the gaming industry has treated itself as being part of the software industry, but it is kind of a weird hybrid,” he added. “I think the future lies in taking that learning from the film industry, where you have core teams that are complimented with either outsourcing or with co-dev for specific needs. You get the right crew for the right project at the right time.”
Don’t forget that Netflix has an Assassin’s Creed adaptation on the way. It recently announced two more of the actors cast, although we don’t yet know what character they will portray.
