It varies. A single-team studio (Bungie in 2014) will likely include QA in a headcount (600, at the time). A studio like Blizzard with multiple teams may separate "game teams" (WoW's Team 2 at ~300) and "support teams" (~100 on T2QA, plus loc, marketing, platform, etc).
Not game dev related but development related. A while back the telegram guy bragged he ran telegram with 30 people (which people assumed meant 30 peopl in engineering roles) which set of some alarm bells for security people due to it being so dangerously low. (Also don't use telegram). Weird brags
This really clicked for me when watching the no clip demons souls remake documentary, where it went on and on about how impressive it's supposed to be they only had like 100 developers and then when they went to explain how they did it, it was simply By outsourcing as much as they could
Yeah, that really has to be taken into account. Otherwise, it devalues the skills and sweat of those outsourced workers. They or their employers might get a credit at the end, but it's worthless if the narrative is that they don't exist or matter.
It's always felt like a combination of a) "contracted labour in other countries doesn't count", like immigrant vs ex-pat but for creative effort, and b) anti-AAA / anti-publisher romanisation of how modern (game) dev can be
Yeah, that's pretty much it. And keeping the spotlight off them also allows studios to 'buy crunch' as the article terms it. The core studio might be visibly crunching less and championed for doing so, but external QA, artists and animators will be instead.
Someone commented they actually haven't, and it wasn't from them that I heard the 30 people thing myself. So it's more of 'We want a perceived underdog to cheer for. Scrappy studio makes their own AAA RPG with few people, take that big studios' type of narrative being passed around.
Yeah, I've commented as much to a couple of people as it's important to recognise where the narrative is originating from. I felt it was food for thought for a wider discussion in general on the status of external game workers as game makers.
There'll always be a core studio/team, a creative figurehead or figureheads, people who shape visions for games to get them going, and that's fine to recognise that. But I think there's room to expand on who gets counted as part of the game-making process and learn more about them through doing so.
Yeah, it sounds like a misunderstanding of the concept of a "core team."
Which is to say that these are the people who probably worked regular hours across the entire development, whereas the contractors would've been involved as-needed...
AND THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT WAS MADE BY 30 PEOPLE.
I believe they had used the same arguments when using BG3 to slam other RPG IPs, so instead of celebrating a game on its own merits its gonna be used by those folks to drag others down.
I've generally being of the sentiment that it's just marketing when you say a game was made by only (X) number of people since it's so rarely true, it's reductive and also dangerous since it sets expectations for a small crew can do unreasonably high.
"This was made by 30 people, and it's GREAT! Your game was made by a few hundred people, and it's BAD, there's no excuse for that!" - guy who tweets 50 times a day and failed to build an IKEA wardrobe.
I've worked on probably 12-15 shipped console games, some of them huge (Mass Effect 2, for example). Have credits in none of them, due to being a subcontractor.
I'm a software dev, and I really hate that QA folks aren't considered "devs" by many of my peers. I'm equally pissed that creatives involved in making games are not considered devs by many people too. You help making a game, as in actually have input on the project itself? You're a dev.
We see this in TV animation a lot too. All those big Disney/WB productions that conveniently have no named animators, and just mention a studio in passing, because they outsource their entire production pipeline to Canada/Korea/India/etc.
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I would also take into consideration that a smaller team would probably outsource more. An interesting discussion can be had there.
Completely unsurprising and frustrating that it's something that gets shared around by gamers and some news outlets, though...
Which is to say that these are the people who probably worked regular hours across the entire development, whereas the contractors would've been involved as-needed...
AND THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT WAS MADE BY 30 PEOPLE.
Some games that claim solo dev ARE "developed" by one person, but it takes more than just developers to bring a game across the finish line.
It pains me to see it happening in games too.