From Jason Schreier. “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’,” but this is some analysis from Schreier seemingly rooted in many anecdotes. The long and short of it is that development on AAA games tend to routinely hit bottlenecks where entire portions of a team are waiting for some other team to unblock them so that they can continue to get work done.
TLDR Bloated staff sizes and poor workflow management means salary costs skyrocket while a lot of people on staff are left waiting for things to do. The article keeps saying the costs aren’t just about better graphical fidelity, but I think this issue is somewhat related because a big chunk of staff are going to be artists of some variety, and the reason there are so many is to pump up the fidelity.
Not that it much matters to me personally. I’ve said before that games have long ago hit diminishing returns when it comes to technical presentation and fidelity. I’d rather have a solid game with a vision, and preferably a good visual style rather than overproduced megastudio visuals. Those kinds of games are still coming out from solo developers and small studios, so it doesn’t affect me one bit if big studios want to pour half a billion into every new assemblyline FPS they make.
Dev teams too big and too much spent on marketing.
Dev teams to big? Then we need bigger and better layoffs
Unfortunately, data shows that people prefer to be advertised to over receiving a better product.
I think the data shows that advertisement is super effective, not that people prefer to be advertised. If people preferred advertising over a better product then games like Balatro, Vampire Survivors etc. literally couldn’t be successful, because those games had effectively zero marketing budget. Their success came from word-of-mouth because the game itself was great.
