AAA games are cheaper to make than you think

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I'm convinced by this line of reasoning. Bioshock did feel very "sparse".

An image macro from gram.pl says over 100 people worked on it and a quick glance at the credits backs this up, though I'm sure the core team was somewhat less. It's also notable how the new engine and awesome new graphics came at the expense of content and variety of creatures (compared to the first).

And as if CD Projekt has any clue on its own.

Which is better and why?

What I mean, is that the team likely made the game they wanted to make, as opposed to being told to produce a ME-killer or whatever the fuck. CDP started out as a publisher, and eventually establishing a game development team was a case of ambition and prestige for them; they were earning enough jewgoldz without it. Notice how they stress the "AAA" status of their games in promotional materials, it's a potato-pride thing. So I can't imagine them treating their developers the way the big publishers do - as slaves in all but name.

You use this as an example as if Witcher 2 didn't have superficial differences between drowners and drowned dead, ernyias and harpies, rotfiends and greater rotfiends...

Overexaggerating much? Bohemia wants to have a word with you about hundreds of CoD weapon models

CoD's quality didn't change in the past 7 years. But CoD became at least 2 times shorter. Which means 2 times less content.

Kotick just throws all people he can into a shit project hoping that the more people he will throw in - the more awesome the end product will be. See CoDMW3 where the retard had 4 teams working on a game 50% shorter than its predecessor for the same 2 years.

And here's a typical modern piece of shit polish shooter made for peanuts:


Tell me more about 6 CoDMW writers and 4 lead designers among other useless people it definitely had and also how Reynolds and Vavra don't know what they are talking about.
CoDMW also had only 13 people in the art department with 4 art leads (why so many leads?)

Now compare this to credits of CoDMW3. A game with exactly the same visual quality, developed for the same 2 years - but has two times less content.

Even lulzier is this

It's like Bobby thought "dayum I still have a few millions to spend until the round number let's blow them into people we will ignore".
4 military consultants for a game that is anti-realistic in everything.

Then you have CoDBlOps

Who are all these people, what are they even doing?

Then they have ~20 people leading the programmer team. Yes nearly twenty fucking "lead technology directors/build managers/lead engineers" doing the same job of a lead programmer.

It's like they have more people giving orders than people following them.

Never claimed otherwise.

Oh okay. Also forgot that bruxa are literally just wraiths with their hoods off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourcing

This is what EA, Activision, Ubisoft are doing. Do you think they have contracted studios in China and India for teh lulz?

Also many top name games are developed by euro studios FYI.

MetalCraze
I can see how EA and Activision might suffer from bloat, but how about the smaller, but still "mainstream" publishers? What kind of budgets do publishers like 2K Games or Square Enix run? How big are their teams?

If you don't mind me asking, skyway, do you have any actual experience in software development? I don't even mean game development on the more complex platforms, that's a relatively small industry going by employment stats, doubt we have any people on the Codex in that line of work (I'm counting on you sea). But, I mean, do you even know what a lead programmer does?

Maybe the numbers are bs? How do you know they are not?

With the right tools much of what constitutes game production is called a game itself.

Stop the money sink and dishonesty of advertising. Make a good games database popular.

Edit; do you? I wrote a complete AI for a 4x game called cosmic supremacy. As did everyone else who played it. If the same tools that were in CS were available for any other 4X game I would easily write ais to shame any that came with the game.

Okay, who the fuck is this? Some kind of prosper clone?

The primary cost lies in marketing and hype rather than game development itself, and on the PoV of a Pepsi-Cola suit and of the other greedy shits that ran a bulldozer over the innovation, that probably counts as "game development"

Nowadays the suits probably consider marketing and PR more important to the gaming industry than the game development itself. Classical case of the a situation where the primary thing being sold is the hype, fad and delusion rather than the content itself, just like it was in the old times with snake oil, or nowadays with brands that are all about recognition and herd behavior and nothing about true quality.

tl;dr AAA is a pretty $5 million package with a brand name in it filled with 0.25c shit inside.

Can we consider this as credible?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_programmer

Now the credits I quoted above sound exactly the same.

Just like having 15-20 producers and throwing 4 studios to make a game that is 50% of a game made 5 years ago by 1, much smaller studio this looks more like a retarded Bobby throwing everything he got at CoD because if you throw more shit into shit it will become even more AWESOME!!1 shit.

But the real truth is that he does it because he can. Retards buy CoD en masse anyway and it brings in profit.
To a corporate suit any profit means he is doing it right. Even if from a dev perspective (as we can see on two quite big name examples) it's actually retarded.

If a 5 hours long linear corridor shooter game didn't have 6 writers, 4 military advisors, 20 producers, 4 lead designers and dozens of other absolutely useless leads to constantly bicker about whose ideas are more awesome - it could've easily costed $10 mln less. If not even more than that.

I wouldn't be surprised if in 5 years games will cost $100 mln to make only because they will have more dudes giving orders than dudes executing them.

What I mean, is that "Lead Programmer" might as well mean a dude in charge of a team of four other dudes, all working on some networking engine module. It's not unreasonable to have more than ten of these in a big project. Now, I totally agree with you that the administrative overhead on a game like Modern Warfare is absolutely insane. But I think it would be nice to actually get some insider info on how these projects operate before declaring they have too many people in this or that specific position.

Cause honestly, I have very little idea on what a producer or a lead technology director does for the development of a game like CoD.

So what would other 10 lead programmers do?

But CoD isn't a big project. It's a linear corridor shooter on a Quake 3 engine. And 5 years ago the team was much smaller while making 2 times longer game.
This will look especially silly if you will look how many programmers they had working on CoDBlops (more than artists) - even though only maps and models change from game to game save for 1 or 2 new "features"

Dude I bet Bobby himself doesn't know who are all those people. I mean I just open DSO and

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/rober...-lead-of-infinity-ward-is-leaving-activision/

Creative Strategist

What the fuck does that even mean? Do they use a random phrase generator to have some positions to put more people in?

Lol, Bowling used to be their PR dude and community manager. The fact that they placed someone without any actual game development experience on top speaks volumes about AAA game industry.

http://www.warhorsestudios.cz/index.php?page=blog&entry=blog_007

Didn't Skyway already post this?

That's some depressing shit.

Nothing surprising. Just look at Blizzard as a texbook example of this -- somehow they manage to make worse games with a thousand times as many people working on it.

just like those gimmick japanese adult productions featuring more than ten women on screen at the same time with their co-stars

if it was just a few actors you'd see them generally doing their best but with this much talent on screen some of them barely even try and what quality there is gets lost and marginalised in the crowd of footage