Recently the games industry has started talking more openly about the unsustainable nature of corporate AAA development structures. That conversation, in one way or another, has been happening for quite some time. Usually it occurs in a very sterile and tortured “capitalism is bad”* surface that rarely addresses alternate constructions of the business. This round, however, happens to be much more open and celebratory of (some) other schools of thought.
That’s great! I’m glad game devs like Xalavier Nelson Jr. are building something small and agile and prolific for developers who don’t need long-term stability with singular projects. I’m glad more AAA teams are unionizing so they can fight against the tide of management miscalculations and unfathomable greed. I’m glad leaner teams and yes, solo devs, are making surprise megahits that set them up for success for years to come.
Love it. But something else is growing out of this conversation I’m not as comfortable with. Not only is misinformation about team size beginning to get out of control, but the way we talk about small teams is starting to sound like corners of the gaming internet I would do almost anything to avoid associating with.
Friday at the Summer Game Fest Showcase, host and creator Geoff Keighley started the festivities with acknowledgement of the variety of games in the top ten bestsellers at the time of the event. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came up as a result, and again the lie that the game was made by “less than 30 developers” was stated as fact. This has been debunked countless times but still parroted uncritically by forum-dwellers and large media outlets alike. Contract labor and, frankly, publishing and marketing labor that helped get the game across the finish line and into millions of homes were vital in making Clair Obscur.
Later in the show Geoff introduced a game called Acts of Blood, which looks like Sifu with guns, by mentioning it was made by a “first time solo dev” and mere sentences later added “with the help of nine of his friends.” That’s not a solo dev, Geoff. But I see you. I know what you’re doing it and sucks. I understand the business case for Geoff, who wants to gas up these small outsider teams and make sure they feel excited to spend thousands and thousands of dollars bloating the yearly June stage show.
It’s also par for the course for Geoff, a person who has spent years buttering up Hideo Kojima as a true auteur while struggling to articulate the struggles of thousands of devs whose voices demand more volume from prominent industry figures when capitalism bucks them into the dirt. I don’t expect much from Geoff and every year I expect less, and yet I sit bewildered at how little he seems to understand the normal people who make the games he claims to adore.
But what about everyone else who has been focused very loudly on team size lately?
What’s your endgame? Perhaps counterintuitively, I think it’s a way to worm a path into regressive stances on labor. Why push for unionizing big teams in AAA companies when really the big size of the team might be the culprit? Why partner with big publishing groups if the poster boy for video games is telling you that more and more, you can make it alone? Geoff’s relationship with big publishers has soured because those publishers know they don’t need Geoff, but what’s your beef? “Going woke” is a dead end argument against quality, so let’s latch onto how “inefficient” large game devs supposedly are as a backdoor into right-wing dogwhistle horse shit.
Also, let’s not even debate the supposed “bravery” of leaving a large publisher you’re statistically likely to be laid off from. Let’s not even debate how brave it is to strike out “on your own” when your dad is part of several investment firms and you have a trust fund! There are worse ways to spend your institutional wealth, but let’s interrogate these conditions before dishing out the superlatives.
Making games is absurdly difficult and the ones who have truly made one by themselves are rare as July snow in Houston. So when an increasing number of these supposed “solo devs” are being propped up by Geoff and other corners of the internet as a clear path forward, it’s based not only on lies but on regressive foundations. A shipped game requires what it requires to ship. If that’s one person, cool. If it’s ten thousand, cool. We don’t have to hand it to big publishers or the bad structures they’ve often built and demolished, but there’s nothing inherently bad about teaming up to do something big.
Focus instead on the quality of life those devs have. Focus on what it means to ship a game and then be able to ship another. Lean isn’t bad, but it’s not inherently good, either. It is what it is. When Xalavier Nelson Jr. made his recent rounds talking about his Strange Scaffold label, I bristled at people shouting some variant of “this is how it’s done” online. Well, Xalavier seems like a good dude and he’s carved a path that works for him. And it works for his labor. Perhaps it’s a blueprint from some to follow, but it’s not a blueprint for all games or all people.
Neither is solo dev or the carelessly constructed lie of solo dev. Neither are huge teams built by executives quick to wash away their mistakes by laying off hundreds when shareholders come knocking. Repeating all of the “solo dev” and “lean team” swooning uncritically does a disservice to all devs, whether they’re spending years shipping something by themselves in a cave or part of a massive group. A shipped game requires what it requires to ship.
*it is bad, but take the next step in the argument
