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Comment by mikeortman | Hacker News Reader

It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?

It's the case for all large tech companies. Headcount increases in software engineering projects result in diminishing returns per-individual, but the increase is still there (if managed correctly). For example a 100 person team may not be 10x as productive as a 10 person team, but they may be 5x as productive. A 1000 person team may only be 3x as productive as 100. And so on until you have many thousands of engineers that can slowly move mountains and maintain massively complex and interwoven systems.

Also, development headcount begets support headcount. For every 10 new engineers you hire, you will need to also hire a manager for them. For every 20-30 engineers, you'll probably need a PM to steer the product and a PjM to handle all the additional communication/process overhead. For every 2-3 managers, you'll need an admin who manages their schedule and meetings. As the team grows, you'll need more people purely working on infrastructure, internal tools, build&release, security, legal, maybe doc writers, and so on, and they all need managers too. Suddenly you have 10K people.

Whenever we see these big layoffs, someone inevitably comes out of the woodwork to naively ask, "Why does Company X need 1,000 people?? I could do what they do with 8 engineers!" This is why.

Same people that thinks they can build an Uber/Lyft/Instagram competitor by themselves over the weekend.

This same comment gets posted on nearly every layoffs thread. A lot of people work at tech companies. Despite that, it sucks for someone to lose their job.

As I always mention in these threads, these are not mutually exclusive. We can both have empathy for those laid off while at the same time questioning the organization's size.

>It blows my mind that many people worked there, only 8% of Microsoft Gaming?

The difference between AAA and the rest is not so much in quality these days, but sheer quantity. Quantity of NPCs, artwork, music, items, skills, vehicles, levels, etc. etc. And it takes a small army of artists/designers/PMs to do all of that stuff, not to even mention the actual dev team.

That sort of thing seems really ripe for LLM/AI disruption?

FantasyGPT trained on all RPGs could be very interesting

It already exists, it's called Baldur's Gate 3

Larian Studios has 450 employees, and BG3 completely blows any other modern RPG out of the water in terms of the sheer amount of fun content inside the game

Many of the assets were reused from previous work (DOS 1/2). They did put in an insane amount of work over a very extended period, though.

Larian Studios has 450 employees...

Exactly, you need a massive team to live up to expectations for AAA games these days.

Baldur's Gate 3 was in development for nearly six years even with asset reuse and basically being the only thing that Larian was working on. And that isn't even taking contractors into account (BG3 credits around 2300 workers).

I don't think you're making the point you think you are.

In times like this, it's important to remember that Skyrim was made by a team of around 100 people.

And we just had Starfield come out to demonstrate how little all that matters.

Crazier still is the cost of employing 22,000 people in one division. Even at a low ball of $100K/year/employee, that’s $2.2 billion in people costs per year. Microsoft needs to be recouping at least $50/year from every single Xbox owner (estimating 50 million out there) to cover that cost alone.

Doesn't seem that difficulty to get $50/yr when Xbox Live itself is around that price. Add in selling games... Add in microtransactions... And I'd wager it's close to $200/yr they get from every single Xbox owner.

Its amazing how many staff you can support with $39.99 wow mounts and a selection of gaudy hats.

Hey, I happen to like my Luxurious Niffen Hat! [1]

[1] https://ironstorage.blob.core.windows.net/public-images/luxu...

Activision Blizzard reported 13,000 employees as of Dec 31st, 2022

And barely 9,200 as of Dec 31st, 2019

The overhiring during covid really went insane in a lot of places

40% increase isn't even that bad compared to some I've seen.

I saw that before the recent layoffs at Discord their employee headcount had grown 5x since 2020, and after the layoffs they're merely at 4x their size of 2020

It doesn't actually have any real impact and there are plenty of counter example, but the fact that Activision is a 40+ years old company who slowly grew to that number before jumping 40% in two years for no reason (no major shift, new product or anything like that, no "we own the world" like microsoft, ...) somehow makes it feel way worse to me that yet another not even a decade tech company that grew crazy for the numbers.

Game development is an extremely labour intensive industry.

And at the same time you have best-in-class games created by one person. (Ok, two, if you add the various publisher/third party help.)

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