Ryuu96 said:
Obsidian is actually working on 3-4 titles; Grounded with ~15 developers, Josh Sawyer IP with ~10, The Outer Worlds team is around 70-80 and that leaves the other 100+ on Avowed which has been in development for around 2 years now and listed as an AAA title. Core studio sizes don't paint the full picture either, The Initiative may be small but they are very much working on an AAA IP. The industry as a whole nowadays relies heavily on outsourcing, Witcher 3 for example, while being such a massive title, only had 250 in house employees, the other 1,250 employees were outsourced, it's simply not accurate nowadays to look at a studios size and only use that to determine how big their games will be. Project Mara is a game, FWIW Ninja Theory has 100+ employees and only 40 are working on Hellblade II, the previous title having been only created with 20 employees so that leaves ~45 unannounced for (Took away 15 cause of Bleeding Edge's team). |
Yes, as I said, bar those Indie like titles with a few devs they will consolidate and form 1 AAA team.
Outer Worlds was in collab with Take Two private division. I predict Avowed will be made with both of those teams, if it wants to release in the next 3 years.
Core studio sizes absolutely do show AAA capability. In house, 300-400 devs allows studios to develop 2 AAA IPs almost parallel. 150-250 is usually whats needed for a AAA game in a timely manner.
The Initiative are still recruiting and their game is a long long while away. Similar to how Sony Bend slowly grew from <100 to 180 and released their first AAA game after 7 years or so of dev.
The way game development works is that as projects get close to release date or full production, teams are grown or consolidated.
My prediction: Obsidian, NT, Initiative are only working on one AAA game.
