[johnnyanmac]

I think that's why the Paradox works. Doom was a technological power house in the 90's. Created by 5 people in 15 months.

Techs advanced enough that you could make a facade of doom by yourself over the weekend (game design aside). Game devs can be so incredibly productive. But instead, demand sweeled to insatiable heights, as well as dev teams. Doom 2016 probably had hundreds of staff involved and 4-5 years of dev time.

That's basically what happens when tech aims to be bigger and better instead of how to optimize each dev themselves to be individually more productive and keep the project lean (company structures aren't helping either).

[adventured]

> That's basically what happens when tech aims to be bigger and better instead of how to optimize each dev themselves to be individually more productive and keep the project lean

Comparing Doom 1993 vs 2016 makes no sense in that context. There's no scenario where you make gigantic scale Doom-style game worlds circa 2016 with even 20-30 people, much less 5-10. Art asset creation alone for 2016 requires far more staff than the original Doom. Optimizing each dev wouldn't begin to scratch the surface in terms of what you need to get to Doom 2016 if we're talking a dozen people or less. You'd need extraordinarily advanced AI agents creating for you, and the year would need to be more like ~2040-2050. The tech underlying a game like Doom 2016 is a modest part of the labor scale problem.

[johnnyanmac]

> Optimizing each dev wouldn't begin to scratch the surface in terms of what you need to get to Doom 2016 if we're talking a dozen people or less.

What do you think comes to mind when you hear "optimizing each dev"? My suggestion was for each dev to work wider, not deeper. There'd inevitably be a hit in raw fidelity, but that's part of the point I wanted to make.

Of course, no amount of automation even with AI will make up for millions of hand crafted man hours. But my big discrepancy with modern game dev is: for how much business want so care about costs and skimping on labor, we go far, far past middling returns in order to deliver these AAA games. I'd definitely wager that you could preserve 80% the quality of Doom 2016 with 20% of the staff (and pay that staff better, not just pocket the 3x cost reduction) and it would still look top of the line. Even then I question the middling returns.

There are good and insidious reasons why it's so rare, but I was really hoping these better tooling over time would produce more indie studios able to work at around a AA level of production. 5-10 people making games that really aren't that vast a gap from AAA presentation to the common consumer. Instead that sector is seemingly shrinking. It's a problem I at least want to try and chip away at in my career.