while AAA projects obviously mismanage the hell out of their budgets and make despicable propaganda from hell more than they make games, those huge teams aren't there for no reason. to get even the left asscheek of the pair of pants the main character wears for the first level of a 10 hour campaign looking good, not clipping, not looking weirdly lit near torchlight, etc, can take one man a week. you add together all the asscheeks and levels and torches in the game, and the manhours spent to make an AAA game quickly skyrocket. at that point, to keep up standards in graphics, animation, design and so on, you need the hundreds-strong teams.
i don't think that alone is non-conductive to good game design, because now and then you do get games like RDR2 that are fun, not (entirely) demonic propaganda, and still keep up all the AAA standards with the thousands of developers putting in work. it's more likely that it's just coincidental that just as fidelity started rising, enemy actors found out just what a good tool games are to push brainwashing on the general populace, and started buying up all the studios and enshittifying them.
you can still see White excellence wanting to poke through, TLOU2 has prime mechanics and graphics. but then some brazillian comes along and demands all of the devs use their skills to depict the most retarded shit ever, otherwise their 500k-a-year salary gets handed to Laquintisha Boutiqyiuful and they have to start begging on the streets of san fran, which is a fate worse than death.
EDIT: just to clarify, this is coming from first-hand experience with organized game-dev, i'm in the middle of a funded project right now with a skeleton crew. we are absolutely feeling the effects of not having those hundred guys to throw around - sure, everything we make comes from the soul and the game will probably be better off for it, but taking a week just to make sure some random subsystem of a subsystem is working, or 2 weeks to develop a workflow tool which will only then let your content creator create content, really starts eating up your available time when you don't have a whole huge company of juniors and mid levels to throw the small things at.
while AAA projects obviously mismanage the hell out of their budgets and make despicable propaganda from hell more than they make games, those huge teams aren't there for no reason. to get even the left asscheek of the pair of pants the main character wears for the first level of a 10 hour campaign looking good, not clipping, not looking weirdly lit near torchlight, etc, can take one man a week. you add together all the asscheeks and levels and torches in the game, and the manhours spent to make an AAA game quickly skyrocket. at that point, to keep up standards in graphics, animation, design and so on, you need the hundreds-strong teams.
i don't think that alone is non-conductive to good game design, because now and then you do get games like RDR2 that are fun, not (entirely) demonic propaganda, and still keep up all the AAA standards with the thousands of developers putting in work. it's more likely that it's just coincidental that just as fidelity started rising, enemy actors found out just what a good tool games are to push brainwashing on the general populace, and started buying up all the studios and enshittifying them.
you can still see White excellence wanting to poke through, TLOU2 has prime mechanics and graphics. but then some brazillian comes along and demands all of them use those skills to depict the most retarded shit ever, otherwise their 500k-a-year salary gets handed to Laquintisha Boutiqyiuful and they have to start begging on the streets of san fran, which is a fate worse than death.
EDIT: just to clarify, this is coming from first-hand experience with organized game-dev, i'm in the middle of a funded project right now with a skeleton crew. we are absolutely feeling the effects of not having those hundred guys to throw around - sure, everything we make comes from the soul and the game will probably be better off for it, but taking a week just to make sure some random subsystem of a subsystem is working, or 2 weeks to develop a workflow tool which will only then let your content creator create content, really starts eating up your available time when you don't have a whole huge company of juniors and mid levels to throw the small things at.
while AAA projects obviously mismanage the hell out of their budgets and make despicable propaganda from hell more than they make games, those huge teams aren't there for no reason. to get even the left asscheek of the pair of pants the main character wears for the first level of a 10 hour campaign looking good, not clipping, not looking weirdly lit near torchlight, etc, can take one man a week. you add together all the asscheeks and levels and torches in the game, and the manhours spent to make an AAA game quickly skyrocket. at that point, to keep up standards in graphics, animation, design and so on, you need the hundreds-strong teams.
i don't think that alone is non-conductive to good game design, because now and then you do get games like RDR2 that are fun, not (entirely) demonic propaganda, and still keep up all the AAA standards with the thousands of developers putting in work. it's more likely that it's just coincidental that just as fidelity started rising, enemy actors found out just what a good tool games are to push brainwashing on the general populace, and started buying up all the studios and enshittifying them.
you can still see White excellence wanting to poke through, TLOU2 has prime mechanics and graphics. but then some brazillian comes along and demands all of them use those skills to depict the most retarded shit ever, otherwise their 500k-a-year salary gets handed to Laquintisha Boutiqyiuful and they have to start begging on the streets of san fran, which is a fate worse than death.
while AAA projects obviously mismanage the hell out of their budgets and make despicable propaganda from hell more than they make games, those huge teams aren't there for no reason. to get even the left asscheek of the pair of pants the main character wears for the first level of a 10 hour campaign looking good, not clipping, not looking weirdly lit near torchlight, etc, can take one man a week. you add together all the asscheeks and levels and torches in the game and manhours spent to make an AAA game quickly skyrocket. at that point, to keep up standards in photorealism, animation, design and so on, you need the hundreds-strong teams.
i don't think that alone is non-conductive to good game design, because now and then you do get games like RDR2 that are fun, not (entirely) demonic propaganda, and still keep up all the AAA standards with the thousands of developers putting in work. it's more likely that it's just coincidental that just as fidelity started rising, enemy actors found out just what a good tool games are to push brainwashing on the general populace, and started buying up all the studios and enshittifying them.
you can still see White excellence wanting to poke through, TLOU2 has prime mechanics and graphics. but then some brazillian comes along and demands all of them use those skills to depict the most retarded shit ever, otherwise their 500k-a-year salary gets handed to Laquintisha Boutiqyiuful and they have to start begging on the streets of san fran, which is a fate worse than death.