Game Development Giant

These thoughts also flashed through Jester's mind.

He didn't mean to leave them out. After all, he still wanted to reuse two very talented designers, Mike Mowaimi and Rob Pardo.

After all, one is the founder of Blizzard, and the other is the key to Blizzard's success, a true ace designer, and Rob Pardo is completely different from traditional Japanese designers. Yes, Japanese game designers have very strong personal abilities. If a game development team is compared to a person, then they themselves are the brains of the team, and the other members are just other organs that make up the human body.

For example, limbs and the like.

These organs must obey the command of the brain. It can be said that although the completion of a game is the result of a complete game development team, most of what is condensed on it is the wisdom of the producer.

This is why Japanese game companies have become increasingly weak in later generations.

The reason why it was directly pulled down by European and American game companies for five or six years, or even longer, is that before the new millennium, the development strength of Japanese game companies was still far superior to that of European and American designers. The entire PS2 The prosperity of Japanese games in the era can illustrate this point, but why, just four or five years later, the entire situation was reversed.

It's like a Japanese game that collapsed in an instant.

It has been completely left behind by European and American game companies - many people say it is because of the technological improvements in Europe and the United States that Japanese game companies can't catch up.

In fact, this is certainly part of the reason, but not the whole reason.

Another part of the reason is that in the habit of Japanese game development, they are too accustomed to treating one person as the core, the brain, and the leader. Others are just tools that obey the instructions of the brain. This kind of cooperation model is similar to that of some insects in the insect world. It cannot be said that this is not good.

However, in some small teams, the game has not yet entered the era of 3a-level game development that requires hundreds of people.

Such a team, such a model, will naturally be able to command like an arm.

But, after a thousand years. When it comes to a 3A-level game, hundreds of people are needed to operate it. Even ten years from now, the total number of developers of games such as the "Assassin's Creed" series, such as GTA5, or even a game will reach the level that everyone can now They all felt scared and suffocated, no matter how serious Jester was. In this era, it is impossible for anyone to believe it when there are thousands of people.

This team management model in which you only serve as the brains of the team and others can only serve as tools will naturally not work.

This is why, in later generations of Japanese game companies. The reason why large-scale teams rarely develop games is because, in addition to financial constraints, they are unfamiliar with this development model.

Many people might say. Japanese game companies are small and cannot afford losses, so they dare not take risks. But it would be wrong to say that Japanese companies are afraid of taking risks.

You need to know which country brought this video game industry down.

Besides, how could these descendants of pirates lack the spirit of adventure?

Of course, future generations will not be able to control a development team of hundreds of people with their own strength. However, there are too few such figures. For example, in future generations, just Activision Blizzard can start the project at the same time. At least five projects, each with no less than a few hundred people, not to mention many that are not weaker than them, such as EA, Ubisoft, T2 and other game developers and publishers, they all have this Strength.

There are also small game companies like cdpr, a Polish jackass, who can form such a development team.

And even if I search all over Japan, I'm afraid I can't find five producers with such a level.

As for the number of people in current game development, it is like the ‘Era’ project established by Jester. From the perspective of future generations, this is the necessary team size for 3a-level game development.

But looking at it now, such a scale is unheard of.

You know, the current game development team, generally speaking, is a large team, which is only forty or fifty people.

For example, Suzuki Yu's am2 has such a number of people.

In the original history, when Naughty Dog developed "Crash Bandicoot" for PS, the number of the team was less than thirty people. This was already a quite large team at the time. Even EA at the time did not have such a scale. of a single team.

When Yu Suzuki developed "Shenmue", he even organized a development team with hundreds of people. The size of this team shocked the industry. In a short period of time, no other game company had such courage and ability to organize such a team. Nintendo is capable of such a continuous development team, but Nintendo will not do this because their games focus on gameplay, not technology.

Therefore, there is no need for such a large team.

As for Sony, they are still frantically acquiring some potential independent studios at this time. How can they have time to form such a large team? What's more, the cost of forming such a team is also extremely terrifying.

Even in the late 1990s, when Sony Online Entertainment, also known as the famous SOE, developed "EverQuest", which shocked the industry and could be called the enlightenment work of "World of Warcraft", the team size was only fifty people. That's all, in order to develop "World of Warcraft", Blizzard poached from soe and poached many meritorious members of "EverQuest".

When they saw that Blizzard had formed a development team of 150 people for "World of Warcraft", they were so frightened that they could not speak. They even talked about it when they recalled it later, saying that they were frightened out of their wits at the time. They had never seen such a large development team before, or even heard of it.

And this is already a new millennium thing.

Blizzard's development of "World of Warcraft" is indeed closely related to "EverQuest".

As we all know, Blizzard's favorite thing is to borrow ideas from other game companies. For example, their famous game "Warcraft" borrowed ideas from Westwood's "Dune 2". People at Westwood are very angry about this. , but there is nothing that can be done about it. They are indeed inferior to others in terms of skills and the games they make are not as good as Blizzard’s. There is nothing that can be done about it.

After all, players only recognize whose games are fun, not who made such games first. (To be continued...)