- A former Assassin’s Creed director has criticized the “untenable” AAA development model
- Alexandre Amancio says “smaller teams” must become the norm
- He added that larger development teams run the risk of creating “a lot of variable noise”
Alexandre Amancio, former creative director for the 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 for 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 tenable,” said Amancio of needing teams of hundreds to develop games. “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,” he continued, “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.”
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 that represent different trades.
“The problem is that each one wants to 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 go faster or brake – and then you’re stuck with that huge train that’s tearing itself apart. So the way I see the future is with a much leaner train: When you stop at a station, you pick up certain sections, you drop off other ones, and so forth, and I think that it becomes more manageable.”
There is plenty of truth to what Amancio is saying here. In the AAA space, the size of teams and budgets are soaring, while the time it takes to bring a game from pre-production to release seem to have increased significantly. I’ve certainly switched to favoring smaller-budget titles over the years.
And that extra time doesn’t always translate to the most polished user experience. Several games of the past decade – perhaps most infamously Cyberpunk 2077 – have launched in broken and buggy states with the intent to fix and iterate post-release. It’s a model that the industry probably relies on a little too much.
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