- Former Assassin’s Creed director criticizes “unsustainable” AAA development model
- Alexandre Amancio says ‘smaller teams’ must become the norm
- He added that larger development teams risk creating “a lot of variable noise.”
Alexandre Amancio, former creative director of the assassin’s creed franchise, has had some choice words about the AAA industry.
In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, Amancio, who previously served as creative director of Assassin’s Creed Unity and Assassin’s Creed Revelations – says the future of game development must come from smaller teams.
“I don’t think we’ll do it. And I don’t think it’ll be sustainable,” Amancio said of the need for teams of hundreds of people to develop games. “As soon as you get past that, the ratio of management to people working on the game explodes. You start to have a structure with a lot of management: you need to have people to coordinate the people who coordinate.”
“Something that a lot of AAA studios do by mistake,” he continued, “or certainly have done in the past, is think that you can solve a problem by throwing people at it. But adding people to a problem waters down the people who were already being efficient at it. It just creates a lot of variable noise.”
Amancio raises the need for “smaller teams” in the future and explains it with an analogy: “The locomotive is the core team, and then you have different sections of the train that represent different trades.
“The problem is that everyone wants to go at their own chosen speed. And then the locomotive pushes in a certain direction at a certain speed, then you have each section trying to go faster or slow down, and then you are stuck with this huge train that is tearing apart. So the way I see the future is with a much thinner train: when you stop at a station, you take certain sections, leave others, and so on, and I think it becomes more manageable.”
There is a lot of truth in what Amancio says here. In the AAA space, team sizes and budgets are increasing, while the time it takes to take a game from pre-production to release appears to have increased significantly. I’ve certainly come to favor lower budget titles over the years.
And that extra time doesn’t always translate into the best user experience. Several games from the last decade, perhaps the most infamous Cyberpunk 2077 – They have been released in broken and buggy states with the intention of fixing and iterating them after release. It’s a model the industry probably relies on too much.
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