(Bloomberg) -- The credits sequence for Starfield, the latest video game from Bethesda Game Studios, lasts for more than 40 minutes. It features thousands of names from around the world, including writers, designers, producers, programmers, animators, 2D artists, 3D artists, analytics managers, studio directors, voice actors, casting directors, session coordinators, sound engineers, dialogue editors, prop supervisors and translators. The core development team included more than 400 people across four different offices.
For Nate Purkeypile, a lead artist on Starfield, the title’s vast scale required a painful amount of bureaucratic grunt work. Throughout the prolonged development process, Purkeypile attended upward of 20 meetings a week to communicate with staff and ensure that everyone was moving in the same direction. Eventually, Purkeypile grew wistful for the old days at Bethesda, where he started in 2007. Back then, their team consisted of fewer than 100 people, worked out of a single basement and yet was able to create major hits such as Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Sick of the bloat, Purkeypile left Bethesda in 2021 and started his own shop. He’s since gone on to make The Axis Unseen, a heavy metal horror game released this month, which he developed himself rather than with a team of hundreds.
“I can pretty safely say there’s not a single day that I’ve even contemplated going back,” Purkeypile said. “That scale of production is not necessarily enjoyable for a lot of people. You’re very much a cog in the machine.”
As video games have grown more complicated, with larger worlds and more realistic graphics, the companies behind them have expanded dramatically. Top franchises such as Assassin’s Creed now employ legions of programmers and artists. In 2022, Activision Blizzard Inc. said it had more than 3,000 people working on Call of Duty. As a result, budgets have swelled. Uncharted 2, from Sony Group Corp’s Naughty Dog, was released in 2009 and had a budget of $20 million. The studio’s latest game, The Last of Us: Part 2, cost more than $200 million.
In response, a significant number of long-time game workers like Purkeypile are ditching mammoth productions in favor of smaller teams where they hope to enjoy more autonomy, work more productively and spend less time in meetings. It’s an aspiration that feels more attainable today thanks to the growing accessibility of powerful game-making tools such as Unreal Engine, which Purkeypile and many others have used.
Exact numbers can be difficult to pinpoint. But in recent years, developers with decades of experience, including top directors at major companies, have left in droves to work for smaller outfits. Some quit voluntarily, while others were pushed out as gaming companies cut tens of thousands of jobs over the last two years.
Renee Gittins, alumni board chair of the International Game Developers Association, said that smaller teams are “more nimble, able to take greater risks and have lower overhead” than larger ones. “Small studios are not burdened by stockholder expectations, who have little regard for the ebb and flow of game development costs and profits,” she said.
Stig Asmussen, who directed two hit Star Wars games for Electronic Arts Inc.’s Respawn subsidiary, quit in 2023 to start his own company. One of his goals, he said in an interview, was to re-create the “frictionless” atmosphere of Respawn’s early, leaner days, before it was purchased by EA and became part of a much larger, more bureaucratic organization.
“When you’re only tracking one hundred people, it’s a lot easier to do things more in line with what exactly the needs of the team are,” Asmussen said.
He plans to hire between 80 and 150 people — enough to execute an ambitious vision without sacrificing camaraderie. “I want to be able to know everybody on the team,” he said.
Learning to create games within tighter constraints can be liberating, said Mike Laidlaw, who worked at big corporations such as Ubisoft Entertainment SA and EA, where he directed Dragon Age: Inquisition. In 2020, he co-founded a new studio, Yellow Brick Games, where he runs a team of around 50 people that he says is able to “look at these limitations of scope as opportunities to be clever.”
He also finds it easier to keep everybody on the same page. “Because the overall team is small, the relationships feel a lot more personal,” he said. “Communication is a lot more direct.”
Veteran developers say that another advantage of smaller teams is that they typically correspond with lower budgets, which often allow game creators to take more risks. Two of this year’s 10 best-reviewed and most successful games — the card game Balatro and the mystery exploration game Animal Well — were created by solo developers. Both make use of experimental gameplay ideas that larger game companies might have balked at, particularly if they were operating with budgets in the eight or nine figures.
“It keeps the cost of development down,” Animal Well creator Billy Basso said. “It’s a much less risky way to finish something.”
Hironobu Sakaguchi, the 61-year-old creator of the Final Fantasy series, has worked on video games since the 1980s. In an interview earlier this year, he said he prefers smaller teams. His latest, the role-playing game (RPG), Fantasian, was crafted using physical dioramas rather than fancy computer graphics in large part, he said, because he “wanted to figure out a way to keep the core team as small as possible.”
“I set out to prove that even with a small team you can create a fun RPG with a bit of creative thinking,” Sakaguchi said.
His company, Mistwalker, employs roughly 30 people and recently held an all-hands meeting at a Yakiniku barbecue restaurant where they could all fit in a single room. “Physically being able to do that, being able to communicate with each other, is for me what creates a really cool environment,” he said.
Some developers believe that when games expand beyond a certain point, they often become less appealing to players. Recent titles such as Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which contain humongous worlds made by teams of hundreds of workers, failed to meet sales expectations, leading to a company-wide crisis.
Heather Cerlan, who spent years working on large games such as Starfield before starting her own smaller outfit, said she thinks fans are finding “big, bloated games” to be wasteful and unnecessary. “Players want games made by developers that are intimately familiar with the project,” she said.
Huge teams can also directly cause production problems by compartmentalizing units and making it difficult for individual workers to playtest their games and identify issues. CD Projekt SA’s Cyberpunk 2077, which was pulled from the PlayStation store after its launch because the game was such a mess, suffered from unwieldy, rigidly siloed teams among other issues, Bloomberg previously reported.
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, a director on Cyberpunk 2077 , left CD Projekt in 2021 and started his own shop with the explicit goal of staying small. He said in an interview that keeping his company below 100 people has many advantages, such as granting individual workers greater autonomy.
Tomaszkiewicz said that sometimes when his studio is creating new features, his programmers will play them, fix any bugs they encounter and even tweak the visual effects. “In bigger companies it’s not possible — there is too much stuff to do,” he said. “This programmer will do the code, someone else will test it and someone else will do special effects.”
For veteran game makers, moving to smaller teams doesn’t just lead to more personal satisfaction and efficient production. It can also lead to better products. Despite being made in 2011 by a team a quarter the size of Starfield’s vast workforce, Skyrim remains Bethesda’s most critically and commercially successful game. Purkeypile, for one, says that’s no coincidence.
“I think the best stuff that came out of those games came out of trusting people,” he said. “To do that, I think you need a smaller, more intimate team.”
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