| Ryuu96 said: (...) Starfield hit just under 300 people on the team (...) [BGS] are like 430 right now, but we have a full team on Fallout 76, we have a mobile team, we still support Skyrim (...) Bethesda Game Studios is tiny for an AAA team working on games of this scale. Maybe it's a hold over from the Private Equity days of having to be lean and profitable but now they're under Microsoft they should definitely staff up, especially when they're producing 10m+ IPs. Rockstar Games, I don't know how big their individual teams are but in total they have 5,939 employees and they only work on Red Dead Redemption and GTA. Think Cyberpunk's core team was bigger too. What other RPGs can we compare them to, Lol. They should be like 600 minimum Imo. |
Yeah, this is definitely a small team to build a AAA game of this scale. The only AAA games with a comparable scale really are RDR2 (1600 devs) and Cyberpunk 2077 (started with about 250 when full development first started, ended with 500+devs by the time the game launched). Starfield by comparison would have started development with about 150 and ended up with just under 300 by the time it released. That is just very small for a game of this scale in terms of map sizes and hours of content and different gameplay systems. It's why Starfield relies on automation for so many development tasks from landscape development to creature/alien creation to randomizing elements of the character creator they designed for background "citizen" type NPC's. Bethesda has always been undersized compared to the size of the games they make, they made Skyrim with about 90-100 and Fallout 4 with 140 as I recall, when Skyrim released the average AAA dev team was like 200 devs, while when Fallout 4 released the average was more like 300 devs.
Bethesda absolutely needs to staff up in the coming years, and a big staff up at that. They have 3 popular IP's to develop moving forwards instead of 2 like the old days, and AAA game development continues to get larger and more expensive each passing year. Bethesda Game Studios overall needs to aim to hit like 750 devs within the next 4 years imo, split with about 100 on Fallout 76 content development, 450 on TES 6, and 200 on Fallout 5. They can no longer afford to develop one main game at a time now that they have 3 big IP, instead they need to aim for active development on two of the 3 IP at once (rather than active development on one and pre-production on a 2nd like they currently do). The only other good option besides simultaneous development on TES 6 and Fallout 5 would be to let Obsidian make a Fallout spinoff, so that fans won't have to wait until like 2034 for the next big Fallout RPG.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 09 September 2023
