How do you organize a game that has 2,000 people working on it?
I mean, with the general state of AAA gaming these days I have to assume they don't. Have you seen some of the shit that's been coming out?
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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I can’t imagine ever working on any project that large. Most of your people will essentially have zero communication with each other, and release a half-assed overbudgeted product as a result
Most of your people will essentially have zero communication with each other
does the texture artist really need to communicate with the advertising co-ordinator?
But does the texture artist need to talk to the modelers? Of course. Do they need to talk to people in sound design? Maybe. What about game engine and programming? Maybe. What about writers? Maybe.
The fact is, you'd probably have a better product at the end of the day if everyone were able to coordinate their efforts.
Not everyone needs to talk to everyone. But many people need to talk to many people.
Microsoft had to abandon the initial Vista project and start over because they couldn't manage a team of 1000 developers. People working on adjacent features had to go through so many layers of management that in some cases the closest shared manager was Bill Gates. For something like getting a change in the shutdown code reflected in the shutdown dialog.
Huge teams become exponentially harder to manage efficiently.
This is exactly what I thought
Ugh... Don't get me started.
Used to work at Rebellion on their IT team. Genuinely a fantastic place to work and the owners seemed to always be super chill. Had a full suit of armour in one of their offices and so many weapons lying around (likely blunt replicas but still really cool).
I wasn't on the game dev team so can't speak for them but I was personally never pushed to work harder and often explicitly told to take breaks.
We also used to have large Unreal Tournament matches at lunch.
So what I really want is a game that gives me a sense of achievement, and with the vaguest possibility that I actually might finish it. And so it'd be really interesting to know how many games are actually finished, and how many games are just abandoned by what proportion of people.
It can be fun to go to an achievement/trophy tracker and compare the numbers for the awards for first and last story missions.
For GTA5 some numbers are:
- Welcome to Los Santos: 1,736,456
- To Live or Die in Los Santos: 565,297
For Assassins Creed Odyssey:
- This is Sparta: 417,003
- Odyssey's end: 207,371
This is the guy who has an awesome medieval history channel on YouTube. Seems like a really down to earth bloke.
Just discovered that channel, and was like "how is this funded??" So I looked him up and what a pleasant surprise it was to see his place in the game industry!
+1 for his YouTube channel. One of the best medieval history channels there is
The rarest human resource there is: good management.
Or bad management and it's an inefficient mess that simultaneously breaks its workers.
By crushing the spirit and exploiting the hell out of passionate workers.
And hire an Outsource Manager so you can farm out most grunt work to underpaid devs in other countries.
Who then proceed to get abused mentally and physically bad sociopathic managers.
Open Source does it all the time, just with a slower pace.
How many open source projects have 2000 concurrent contributors working full time on it?
Excluding the "Open Core" projects, those people don't normally have management breathing down their necks.
open core isn't open source, imo.
That's why I put it in quotes.