Former Assassin’s Creed director Alexandre Amancio has shared his thoughts on AAA development, suggesting we need “small teams” and admitting that big-budget developers can’t “solve a problem by throwing people at it.”
In an interview with our sister site GamesIndustry.biz, Amancio – who currently works at FunPlus – spoke candidly about his time at Ubisoft, suggesting that it’s not “tenable” to continue making bigger and bigger games with more and more people.
“There’s this theory that any time humans create something that’s bigger than a hundred people, it completely changes the dynamic of it. As soon as you get past that number, the relationship between management and the people working on the game explodes. You start to have a very management-heavy structure: you need people to coordinate the people who coordinate,” he said.
“What a lot of AAA studios wrongly do, or certainly have done in the past, is think you can solve a problem by throwing people at it. But adding people to a problem stagnates the people who were already effective on that problem. 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 “merged” into smaller core teams, where each team is “built for this project, it’s a temporary team”, but gaming is different from films because projects change and evolve over time, whereas in the film industry, “you have a script, it’s solid, and then you just go and shoot it”.
“Since its inception, I think the games industry has considered itself part of the software industry, but it’s kind of a weird hybrid,” he added. “I think the future lies in learning the film industry, where you have core teams supplemented by either outsourcing or co-development for specific needs. You get the right team for the right project at the right time.”
Don’t forget that Netflix has an Assassin’s Creed adaptation in the works. He recently announced two more cast members, although we don’t yet know which character they will play.
