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by Cthulhu_ 938 days ago
> I don't see that happening today, to be honest, in "AAA" titles at least.

Thanks for adding that caveat; it's an unfair comparison IMO to compare the well-selling games of 25 years ago with AAA games of today. Half-Life was built by a team of about 80 people according to a quick Google, and there wasn't the ecosystem of tooling, resources and outsourcing that we have today, versus hundreds if not thousands of people (if you include outsourcing / engines / etc) for AAA titles today. And the modern day game devs will have enjoyed a relevant education, whereas back then those educations didn't exist yet. Notably, John Carmack did a lot of ground work in translating math into 3D video game engines; he was behind Wolfenstein, then Doom, then Quake, and the Quake engine was used as the basis for Half-Life's.

Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it, Hollow Knight's Team Cherry has just 3 employees (but they used Unity so they didn't have to do much engine programming, and the ports to various consoles was outsourced); Wube (Factorio) has had a few dozen people working on it. "indie" hit Kingdom Come: Deliverance had like 240 people working on it.

1 comments

> Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it

I wouldn’t call Hades an indie hit in the classic sense. Bastion was an indie hit, but by Hades supergiant had releases 3 acclaimed games.

That’s not to detract from the well deserved success of Hades, but SG was damn well established by then.

Past success is a weird way to define "indie". The term is usually used to distinguish smaller teams from their bigger AA/AAA counterparts, and I think most people still consider Supergiant an indie studio.
Exactly. Indie doesn't come from the word new, it comes from the word independent. Are you a team detached from the traditional large players in the industry. Yes? Then you're indie.