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.

Comments

Actually, they still do make games that way

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we forgetting that indie game developers are still frequently one programmer and one artist? Fez, Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight and Undertale are all games made by unbelievably tiny teams.

As an indie developer who is making a profit...

[Anonymous Coward]

I call hyperbole.

Unity has allowed me to develop games on my own just fine. Easily portable across multiple platforms.

Re:As an indie developer who is making a profit...

[Opportunist]

This. Unity is a godsend for indies. Easy to pick up, allows to get something presentable in rather little time and compared to the days of yore where matrix algebra pretty much had to be your first hobby (with games coming at a somewhat reasonable distance) if you wanted to as much as think about game development, you also need rather little in terms of actual coding experience to produce something.

Sadly, that's not the case with graphics. I'm a programmer with no graphics skills whatsoever, what I'd have needed was the opposite of what Unity brought us. :(

Team Size?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I first read the title, I assume they would be complaining about how games have changed over time.

Pay to Win taking over, especially in the mobile market.
Games that only let you play so much at a time before you are cut off - unless you pay. Half the reason for cutting you off is that there isn't much depth to the game and you could finish in an hour.
Puzzle games that are too easy and over way too fast because people have a short attention span - and even those you can pay to skip levels.
Inability to fail / lose a game. You die and you simply pick up where you left off with no penalty.

No one makes games like Mario Bros. No save. You die - Start from the beginning. If you want to win, you must be perfect.
I'm not saying Mario Bros is the greatest game ever, but it's better than most games today with their awesome graphics.

Re:Oh really?

[_xeno_]

I'm expecting No Man's Sky to be kinda like Elite: Dangerous, lots of potential falls flat on it's face with execution. If it manages to pull a Minecraft I'll be pleasantly surprised, No Man's Sky is the biggest indie title to launch this month though.

It won't. The reviews are coming in and they're brutal: it's interesting for the novelty factor at first, but quickly becomes tedious and boring. The "procedurally generated planets" boils down to "picks a few random colors and resources." Even people who enjoyed it can't recommend it to other players because it's yet another one of those games that mistakes "hours of content" for "depth." Because if you had fun doing a task once, clearly you'll have 100 times as fun doing it 100 times. That's how fun works, right?

Which is a problem I've seen a lot in games recently: the apparent assumption that the solution to a lack of gameplay is to just repeat the same gameplay many times, as if that will make up for a lack of content.

I guess they really don't make them like they used to, when it was OK for a game to be short as long as it was fun to play.

Re:Well..

[_xeno_]

Yeah I too preferred the old computer games that eschewed CGI in favor of hand painted and animated models.

I wonder how many people realize you're not joking: the original Doom and Doom II models were literally clay models that were shot from various angles to make the final sprites.