Ex-Assassin’s Creed Director: Big-Budget Games Are Unsustainable
▼ Summary
– Major game studios are struggling with unsustainable development, leading to fewer successful blockbuster releases each year.
– Former director Alexandre Amancio argues the core problem is oversized teams, which create management-heavy structures that stifle efficiency and innovation.
– He proposes a future of smaller, project-based teams, similar to the film industry, to assemble the right crew for each specific game.
– A key challenge in adopting this model is that game development takes years, unlike film, forcing studios to maintain long-term roots.
– Amancio reflected that *Assassin’s Creed: Unity* had to abandon a more innovative co-op concept to deliver the traditional game fans expected.
The video game industry faces a mounting crisis as the traditional model for creating blockbuster titles shows significant cracks. Former Assassin’s Creed director Alexandre Amancio argues that the fundamental structure of large studios, with their enormous teams and budgets, is inherently unsustainable. This perspective comes amid widespread reports of project cancellations, extended development cycles, and frequent layoffs, pointing to systemic issues beyond simple market fluctuations or management errors.
Amancio, who directed Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, points to team size as a primary culprit. He references a theory that once a creative project surpasses one hundred people, its entire dynamic shifts. Management layers multiply exponentially, coordination becomes a massive undertaking, and efficiency often plummets. The instinct in many AAA studios, he notes, has been to solve problems by adding more personnel, a strategy that typically backfires. “Adding people to a problem stagnates the people who were already being efficient on it,” Amancio explains. “It just creates a lot of variable noise.” His proposed solution is a move toward smaller, more agile teams.
He suggests the industry should look to Hollywood for a better operational model. Rather than maintaining permanent, bloated studios, developers could assemble specialized crews for specific projects, leveraging outsourcing or co-development partnerships to fill temporary needs. This “right crew for the right project” approach would formalize the project-based work that already happens informally, often followed by painful layoffs. The key difference, however, is the timeline; film productions wrap in months, while game development spans years, making long-term stability a harder challenge to solve.
Reflecting on his own experience, Amancio shared insights into the development of Assassin’s Creed: Unity, which grappled with dual visions. The team was simultaneously crafting a traditional narrative-driven experience and an ambitious cooperative game with a hidden character creation system. This system cleverly used the Animus’s lore, framing it as a database where players would “search” for an ancestor by defining traits. Ultimately, the choice was made to pursue the more recognizable single-player path. Amancio admits, “somewhere inside of me, I still wish we would’ve gone for that other one,” highlighting the creative compromises forced by the scale and expectations of AAA development.
(Source: PC Gamer)
