As a bit of a thought exercise, I went through every mainline GTA game using that website to get an idea of each title’s respective headcount:
GTA : 86 people (DOS)
GTA2 : 170 professional roles (Windows)
GTA3 : 185 professional roles (PS2)
GTA:VC : 688 professional roles (PS2)
GTA:SA : 780 people (PS2)
GTA4 : 1,333 professional roles (PS3)
GTA5 : 3,686 professional roles (X360)
So while the general headcount growth over time tends to track, as each generation of platform requires more and more people to churn out higher fidelity content, I can’t help but wonder what portion of that headcount is just there to churn out micro transaction and Games-as-a-Service garbage.
A good number of that is 3D artists. Try making a highly detailed 3D model in Blender. Now imagine a game like GTA V has thousands of those, but even more detailed. This is one of the major reasons why AAA are taking longer and longer to produce. At the same time, game systems and mechanics are simplified to cut costs.
Well the other thing is that design work doesn’t scale the way art does. You can’t throw 1000 game designers at a project and expect them to create a coherent game design.
So you end up with one or a small team of game designers and they need to get the major parts of the design done early since everyone else follows from that. This leaves you with so little room for experimentation that you end up with a cookie cutter game design.
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As a bit of a thought exercise, I went through every mainline GTA game using that website to get an idea of each title’s respective headcount:
So while the general headcount growth over time tends to track, as each generation of platform requires more and more people to churn out higher fidelity content, I can’t help but wonder what portion of that headcount is just there to churn out micro transaction and Games-as-a-Service garbage.
A good number of that is 3D artists. Try making a highly detailed 3D model in Blender. Now imagine a game like GTA V has thousands of those, but even more detailed. This is one of the major reasons why AAA are taking longer and longer to produce. At the same time, game systems and mechanics are simplified to cut costs.
Well the other thing is that design work doesn’t scale the way art does. You can’t throw 1000 game designers at a project and expect them to create a coherent game design.
So you end up with one or a small team of game designers and they need to get the major parts of the design done early since everyone else follows from that. This leaves you with so little room for experimentation that you end up with a cookie cutter game design.