Several of CDPR's top talent leave to form Rebel Wolves studio. Just... Why?

[LegitHyperbole]

G2ThaUNiT said:

Outside of toxic work environment that would burn out anyone, one of the biggest reasons is going to be creative freedom. Under major established studios, a creative lead may have great ideas and wants to take risks on an upcoming project, but upper management that would prefer to show big numbers to shareholders will shoot down a lot of those great ideas and risks for something safer and so far away from the devs vision.

Gaming is nowhere near the same as it was 20 years ago where it was still considered a "nerdy" hobby to have, so major game companies focus now on reaching out to as many people as possible, and those big budgets are big reason for it. 20 years ago, a AAA game could sell 1 million copies and it would be more than enough to fund the next project. Now, those kinds of sales figures can shut a studio down.

When the behemoth that was Halo 3 released, Bungie barely had 100 developers that worked on the game. Compare that to something like Assassin's Creed Valhalla that routinely has thousands of developers. That requires a LOT of ROI to keep the studio rolling and so creative freedom is often very limited. Otherwise, companies will pull the plug.

One of my top 5 most anticipated games is Exodus from Archetype Entertainment. The Lead Designer and Lead Writer from BioWare's glory days starting with the first Baldur's Gate founded the studio and in the many Q&A videos they've posted about the game, they very often mention "creative freedom" being one of the driving factors behind the studios founding.

I see. Perhaps it's time for these studios to fix this and reorganise so they can keep their talent. The most important asset they have for making money and not only that but throw buckets of money at these people instead of shitty marketing with failing games media. And to what you said, I heard that there is a process in big studios today where if they pitch and idea or want to make a small change in code or something and it could take 45 minutes of work to do but ends up taking weeks cause it has to go through people and they need to check with other people and so on and so forth. Perhaps it's time to organise, Naughty Dog and Sony First party seem to have it down to a science and no one leave those studios. Whatever they are doing they need to let the rest of the industry know.