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. :(

frankly our new process is best.

[nimbius]

Our studio uses a contemporary coding process thats actually quite simple.
1. check out the code in git.
2. make your changes
3. screw something up, or not, delete the entire directory and copy it from a friends laptop at a bar
4. sacrifice an intern to the code goblin that now unaccountably lives in the ceiling.
5. did that copy thing fail? okay, uh, do 'man git' and let your eyes just glaze right over...bill in design says thats how he gets it to work.
6. no worries, probably just a very minor thing, im told the goblin is gone and the second story window near the parking lot is completely blown out.
7. have a stand up scrum down burn through meeting with a swimming pool lane change and a shift merge from your branch goal. Does GIT do that? did it ever?
8. check the microwave in the breakroom...donnies had that hot pocket in there for like 8 minutes and its causing a lot of anxiety...
9. management said the software is done, so uh, tidy up what you were working on and stop dicking around in GIT.
10. there ya go, codes out and the software is a huge success. the next upgrade should OH CHRIST ITS THE GOBLIN SOMEONE GET THE AMULET!!

Re:frankly our new process is best.

[jeff4747]

Our studio uses a contemporary coding process thats actually quite simple.

Your process is missing a few things. Your programmers don't write unit tests and you don't have dedicated QA team to look for bugs.

So he's accurately portraying contemporary coding processes at game development companies.

Re:frankly our new process is best.

[lgw]

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.

Puff Piece

[Anonymous Coward]

And more often than not, those AAA games turn out to be fast-food McVideo games with all the bullshit that comes with prioritizing revenues over gameplay.
There's plenty of examples of indie hits not made by AAA studios, this article is just a Ubisoft puff piece for that abhorred thing called a Watch Dogs sequel and their other less than exciting franchises.
Seriously, what happened to Ubisoft after Assassin's Creed 2?

Re:Puff Piece

[tepples]

Will I actually get to watch some dogs in the next Watch Dogs?

Oh really?

[Anubis IV]

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.

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..

[squiggleslash]

They're also leaving out that while the new games tend to be awash in great CGI, they also tend to... suck.

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

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.