No they dont. They're sized according to their needs, if a game demands 200 devs to finish in 36 months then they're not gonna pull 400 devs for the job for half the time. You're not entitled to a better polished game if you go AAA. Because the AAA dev doesn't make a indie game on AAA budget.

Also AAA is not some magic status which grants you infinite amount of budget and team size. Some unforeseen shit happens during development, or it's taking longer than anticipated, game needs to be delayed, happens regardless whether you're indie or AAA.

You realize you agreed with my statement. The fact they're able to pull as many people as they need is something that non-AAA developers do not have. If they're short-staffed, then they're out of luck. There's no pool of resources or other teams (Ubisoft, EA, and Sony pulled from other internal studios to assist in development on every major project) to go to. They have an advantage that smaller studios don't, so I my level of expectations rises accordingly. It's not fair to do this on a critical level, but as a consumer, I expect more from Rockstar, Sony, Nintendo, Ubisoft, etc than I do of smaller studios that don't have the same scale.

I never meant to say that unforeseen things can't happen, but with the level of oversight and multiple levels of management at larger studios, you expect better scheduling and development progression.

I think the issue for Mighty No. 9 and Bloodstained is the heads of development, Igarashi and Inafune come from backgrounds that were backed by big corporations with a great deal of money, resources, and man power. They lost that when they left Konami and Capcom respectively and they started their own company. Yes, Igarashi was a huge part of Castlevania, Inafune was a huge part of Mega Man, but remember, they are only parts to a whole. There were tons of other amazing programmers and artists working beside them because Konami could hire them, because they had the money, see where this is going?

4 million dollars is a lot, but to make a AAA style game on that is near impossible with a small team, without delaying it.

Well, everyone wants to bath on the hype but very little have the competency to comply with the timelines and hurdles.

No I dont think you understand. You seem to have glossed over 2 important parts of my statement. First read the part "AAA devs dont make indies on AAA budget" again. AAA games are much more complex and bigger, they need the manpower according to their needs but they don't have surplus manpower like you seem to think. Second: no they're not able to pull as many people as they need. Like I said: AAA is not some magic status which grants you infinite amount of budget and team size.

You're even less entitled to a better polished AAA game because making them and managing such big teams is that much more complex, therefore much more prone to something going wrong, and the stress to make money is much bigger since the product costs only 3x as much as an indie but the cost to create is 10 to 100x bigger and need to sell millions to break even. Oh and I haven't talked about meeting deadlines for the publisher and the crunch that comes with it.

There are double standards by gamers today, and no doubt it comes from cynical youtubers who made it their schtick to hate on the next big game.

Crowd funding has caused this. You are asking for money and then based on the input of money, promising certain things in the game. Before had it was just an indie studio, using what resources they could to make and a release a game, from that they'd get money from profits to make another.

Now they are getting the money before they even finish the game so they are less included to actually release the game to make a profit. When people pay into Kickstarters they are paying into the promise of a product, not actually the product.


This said, game development seems to be getting longer for some reason, you'd think with increase in technology, programmes would also make it easier to develop certain things too... oh well.

Yeah, I can't hold indies to the same standards as AAAs when it comes to schedules. If an indie misses a date, I understand. Murphy's Law averages quite a bit higher with smaller teams.

Yes but I think there is a bit of a difference.

Indies often need that early traction to build an audience. Square Enix xould announce Final Fantasy XV 2 months before launch and its sales wouldn't be much different, hell they may even be higher as people wouldn't loose excitement.

Although Kickstarters go without needing an explanation many indie games may be in a similar position in that they're trying to garner more funding.

Games have increased exponentially in complexity over the past couple decades (along with consumer expectations).  Technology is advancing, yes.  But the human ability to create content can only go so far. Artists and programmers can only pump out stuff so fast. And of course, this complexity means that more stuff can go wrong with a game, necessitating considerably more testing.  Which is why big publishers throw more money at game development to get things out in a timlier fashion. But then we run into the problem of games having to sell more copies just to break even, etc. We need to either expect that games will continue to take longer to create, or we have to curb our expectations on things like graphics and other aspects that increase game development time.