| jarrod said: Where are people getting that SPP is a "small" studio? They have a 60-person R&D team... I mean that's not huge or anything, but it's not exactly small either. In fact, it's larger than Realtime Worlds was back when they made Crackdown (though they've beefed up since then for MMO development, and now are over 200 people). |
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/03/25/gdc09-an-infamous-interview-with-sucker-punchs-brian-fleming/
So, how long has inFamous been in development?
You know, we've been in development a little over three years. It's a long project for us. It's, you know, we're not the biggest team and when we wanted to do this we kind of knew where the budget was going to fall, and we actually asked Sony if it was okay to do a smaller team, three-year plus thing rather than a "let's try and cram it out in two years and get big."
I think, for us, it was the right choice. We are a really iteration-based studio where, you know, this mission that you're playing isn't the oldest mission in the game, but it's probably worked on more than any other mission. But even then, like the karma, and the powers, and the climbing systems, those are things that, at least for us, really took a lot of integrational polish to start to really interrelate and gel together. We really felt like for a new IP, that was the right strategy for us.
Is there a direct correlation to a big team that has to get a game done in a year versus a small team that has three years?
I mean, you know, if you look at the pie chart of the spend to build a modern video game, the vast majority of it is personnel. There's only so much you can spend on rent and soft drinks. You just can't spend a lot. And so, it's man years. You can decide how you want to divide that up. If you divide by two, you have more man years than that one year.
You mean soft drinks aren't one of the major expenses in game development?
Shockingly small.
So, what is the size of your team?
If you counted everyone from our IT guy, to the front desk person, to our contract QA guys, it's about 60 people.
That's a fair size.
Yeah, no, I'm not saying we're teensy.
That's still fairly small for an AAA title.
I mean, for a big, open environment we didn't outsource the art -- we didn't. We made this game -- our studio.
4 ≈ One
