Best of luck to the new team, looking forward to awesome stuff...
My guess, though, is that he didn't actually make that choice and was told by Take-Two to downsize, and this is him pretending it was a voluntary "creative" decision, like politicians who want to spend more time with their family.
That would probably be the nicest thing anyone has ever said about him. He is not well liked by past co-workers or employees.
A game that would be considered incomplete ~5 years ago is launched. You then ship up to a dozen DLC packages that add incremental content so that the complete purchase price of the game and all DLC is 2 to 3x the original retail price.
That's how they justify the huge teams. I know it's very different market, but just look at how Turbine went from 500-600 employees to under 200. Look at how Zynga had 2,000 employees. Now wonder what, exactly, all those people were doing?
It's compelling, especially to veterans like Levine, to return a team that's no more than 3 or 4 dozen people and create / ship a complete product that they have a high amount of creative control over. Reminiscent of Double Fine / Psychonauts.
At least I hope that is what they are doing.