Hacker News Reader

Comment by uxhacker | Hacker News Reader

What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team.

What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.

For the most part, those teams are art teams. At my last studio, we had more artists than programmers, designers and producers combined. Games are still being made by small teams and succeeding - “sir we have an orc problem” was a 4 month project with a 2 person studio that sold a million copies.

The problem is once you push into the slightly higher tier of games, the 1-15M budget, the expectations of everyone (players, publishers, executives, developers) go through the roof. It’s very hard to look at those projects and not compare them to projects that are 4/5x that.

But the original game was very playable and fun. There are plenty of modern games that only have a tiny bit more game play.

Myst is a fun game, but the game play is little more than the original Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT). Instead of typing in commands, you clicked on things on the screen. I.e. the game play code was pretty simple.

I think out of the original team there where only 1 and half developers.

> What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.

Seems no one has written "The Mythical Man Month" for the game industry yet.

It’s predominantly artists, and art pipelines are usually fairly scalable .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com