- 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, the former creative director for the Assassin's Creed franchise, has voiced strong opinions regarding the AAA gaming industry.
In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, Amancio, who previously directed Assassin's Creed Unity and Assassin's Creed Revelations, argues that the future of game development should focus on smaller teams.
"I don't think we do. And I don't think it's tenable," Amancio stated, referring to the necessity of large teams for game development. "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 further explained, "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."
Amancio emphasizes the importance of smaller teams, using 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."
Amancio's insights resonate in an industry where team sizes and budgets are escalating, yet the time taken to develop games from pre-production to release has also significantly increased. I've certainly switched to favoring smaller-budget titles over the years.
However, this additional time does not always result in a polished user experience. Several games released in the past decade, notably Cyberpunk 2077 - have launched in broken and buggy states, with the intention of fixing and iterating post-release. This model may be overly relied upon in the industry.
