Comment by detaro
1 day ago
Hiring lots of people and setting grander goals (because you have lots of money and just hired tons of people) is an excellent way of slowing development down for a while, it doesn't make things go faster.
Bigger projects take longer, and many studios chased bigger and better, instead of aiming smaller. Which then meant that these things had to be standout hits to be considered successful, which puts more pressure on perfecting everything, which takes more time, ...
Then many studios have stories of either deep direction changes or large projects being cancelled as the money wasn't as available anymore and trends shifted. E.g. Sony alone has probably spent over a billion and multiple years of work of several studios on live-service games that they then scrapped, Dragon Age Veilguard pivoted a few times (and ended up a mess as a result), ... stories like that across the AAA space.
Yeah, it's unintuitive that more people = slower, as most people have never hit that level of scale. But it means teams and managers and communication communication communication.
Will Wright said that you go from 4 hours of work per hour of meetings to 1 hour of work per 4 hours of meetings. This can be scaled down with wikis and tools. Chinese companies tend to have "living documentation" aka system analysts - a person whose job is to understand everything and be asked questions whenever someone gets stuck. Western companies are very resistant to this model for some reason.
Bethesda is another way to build things at scale. Lots of isolated sections that don't link into the main thing. But it's hard to build something like Fallout 2 that way when the whole story isn't in one person's head.
Part of the reason for so many layoffs recently is because it works. It's a magic tool that increases speed and reduces costs, and you just pay for it with everyone's motivation and soul.