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They Quite Literally Don't Make Games the Way They Used To (theguardian.com)
The days of two developers making games in a shed are over, an article on The Guardian says. Spend any time with your grandparents and at some stage the age-old phase "they don't make them like they use to" will pop up as nostalgia gets the better of them. Usually it's just the rose-tinted glasses talking, but for video games it's a fact: they quite literally don't make them like they used to. Back in the 1980s, when the industry was in its infancy, games were often created by two-person teams consisting of one programmer and one artist. In the 1990s, sprites gave way to 3D modelling, and development teams mushroomed in size, hoovering up specialists in disciplines across animation, level design, character modelling and artificial intelligence. Today, creating the most advanced, triple-A games has become too big a task for a single developer leading to the rise of what is best described as a modular approach, where different developers work on different parts of a single game. The article adds: One developer that is pioneering the modern modular approach is no spring chicken. Set up in 1984, Newcastle-based Reflections swiftly established a reputation for bringing cutting-edge graphics to side-scrollers such as Shadow of the Beast and the gloriously named Brian the Lion. It then morphed into a driving-game specialist, thanks primarily to the Destruction Derby and Driver franchises. French publisher Ubisoft acquired the studio in 2006, expanding its remit way beyond its previous practice of churning out a new Driver game every three years or so. Reflections is crafting the vehicle components of the upcoming Watch Dogs 2 and Ghost Recon Wildlands and has just finished the Underground downloadable content (DLC) pack for The Division. It's finishing Grow Up, the sequel to 2015's Grow Home -- ironically, a small, innovative download game made by a 90s-style 10-person team.
I'll grant that the small team is no longer the industry norm, but suggesting they don't make them like that any more is just preposterous. The biggest game launching this month, No Man's Sky, was originally developed by a team of just five developers. It wasn't until a year or two into development (well after the game was announced and the first trailer shown) that they brought in five more developers. And I was just looking at Prey For the Gods the other day. It's being made by three guys working out of a basement or garage, as I recall. Braid was a two-person job (programmer + artist) with music that was licensed from others. And how could I forget mentioning Cave Story, which was entirely developed by a one-man "team" who did all of the artwork, programming, and music himself?
Pick an indie game, and it's likely built by a small team. They may not all stay small (e.g. Minecraft), but you can only suggest they don't make games like that any more if you start by ignoring the entire indie scene which is doing quite well for itself.
Not missing. Unit tests and QA are costs, and in today's lean environment, we need to keep costs down.
That's fine as long as you deliver a flawless product. Fixing mistakes after the product is in the hands of consumers can get very expensive.
For my team, it just added complexity with no benefit. Team's workflow with SVN was "update early and often". Commit changes. That was basically it. With Git it's been an insane nightmare. The only thing I can figure is that either most teams use the "gateway" merging model, where one person does most of the merging, or the teams do not frequently have multiple developers working in the same files. Under years of SVN, merging was a nonissue for the team. Under Git, there's always some sort of drama.
That's fine as long as you deliver a flawless product. Fixing mistakes after the product is in the hands of consumers can get very expensive.
I see you're out of touch with the modern game industry. A game that actually works the first week after release is newsworthy, and game disks often contain only a Steam installer (and the few console games I've played similarly downloaded the whole game before they were ready to play, and often did again within a couple weeks after they came out).
Steam refunds are working on making the "release crap and (optionally) patch later" strategy less profitable, but it's still quite common.
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