A small games manifesto

Hi, I am Brandon Dillon, co-founder of 2weeks, a new independent development studio building experimental games on the open web. As many of you know, games cost too much to make.

I’m speaking less about the current economics of game development, though certainly much has been written about the difficulties faced by the industry during the current period of contraction.

I’m speaking about the personal costs to us as developers. As a game’s team size expands, your relative contribution to the work shrinks. As development timelines rise, you get fewer opportunities to make new games. The risks increase as well: delays and cancellations can further dilute and erase your contributions.

AAA games now often take 5-7 years to make. According to the 2023 gameworkers.org survey, more than half of all developers (57.3%) worked on AAA games, and less than half (45%) had tenures longer than seven years. Many game developers are lucky to ship a single game.

We find ourselves in a unique time - the pandemic led to a gaming bubble that has since burst, and rising interest rates have cut off the easy access to capital that could help studios weather the reversal, but these dynamics have only amplified a trend that has been steadily progressing.

Raph Koster has been talking about the central cause for a long time: development budgets correlate with technology advancement, and both have been growing exponentially. Almost two decades ago, Koster gave a talk where he referred to this phenomenon as Moore’s Wall.

Related:Why is it so expensive to make games in the United States?

Moore’s Law is a famous observation in computing that the number of transistors in computer chips has doubled roughly every two years. After decades of consistent doubling, the phenomenon has led to astounding growth in the capabilities of our computing devices and will continue to.

Moore’s Wall represents the realization that the increase in content production needed to keep up with this growth will eventually hit an economic limit. Koster updated his analysis in 2018 and concluded that development costs for AAA games were increasing roughly 10x every 10 years.

Audience growth has let us keep up with rising costs for a long time. Good news: gaming is now pervasive! NewZoo’s latest global gamer study shows that 94% of Gen Alpha play games. Bad news: this means audience growth is now just population growth.

Development costs continue to grow exponentially, but audience growth no longer does. There’s still opportunity for growth in emerging markets, but it is not exponential. There’s an intercept point where our current approach to game development ceases to be economically feasible.

Related:The illusion of skill: how to make a better game in less time

There’s a good chance we’ve hit that point.

So, what do we do?

Some folks believe that AI tools will drive more efficiency, but as Koster notes that we’ve actually been getting more efficient at producing content the whole time; just not fast enough to keep up with the pace of technology. AI tools are not likely to close the gap. Koster has a number of useful suggestions to manage rising costs including embracing tools, but mitigations are not enough. The thing we need to do is clear:

We need to make smaller games.

Of course, indie developers have been building on a smaller scale the whole time, and they’ve become an increasingly important part of our ecosystem. Thanks to the Wall, that trend will continue. According to Konvoy, indie games accounted for 31% of all Steam revenue, and is up significantly so far in 2024.

Many AAA studios have their roots in this kind of small-scale development. Even the greatest epics of our medium trace back to smaller, more experimental games. GTA III, perhaps the strongest influence for the modern AAA open world formula, was developed in two years by a couple dozen people. Elden Ring traces its lineage back to King’s Field, developed in six months by ten people.

King’s Field for the PlayStation 

Elden Ring

But as traditional studios have grown to larger and larger scales, they’ve lost their connection to this style of development. The work becomes more about building an efficient content production organization and less about finding new kinds of compelling gameplay.

That’s not to say that traditional studios don’t try. It’s hard not to - every studio is full of tons of talented and creative developers with compelling ideas for new games. Most large studios have some kind of internal incubation or prototyping process to try and harness that energy. Too often, though, projects from these incubation efforts fail to make it past the greenlighting process.

Often, this has little to do with the potential market viability of the new game concept, and much more to do with the internal pressures at the studio. This isn’t just because of studio politics and risk aversion. As people have built massive organizations that have become heavily specialized in making a particular kind of game, it’s often simply too much risk to change that organization to build a different kind.

And yet, something must change. Games that require massive teams are unsustainable and will hit an economic limit that will force studios to scale back, hurting teams and failing to meet player expectations. This will lead to stagnation and decline or has already.

Source: Video Game Business Management Economics, Eric Bailey

If you’re part of leadership at a traditional studio, it’s time to greenlight the risky new ideas - especially the ones that can scale without a huge content investment. Build smaller teams, take new, leaner approaches to production, to bring new games to market. Your future depends on it.

If you’re a developer at a traditional studio, and you have ideas for newer, smaller concepts the studio can pursue, pitch them! Your studio needs to find new paths. If new paths don’t seem possible, keep an eye on the growth potential for the studio’s existing projects and make your own evaluation of the long-term sustainability of the studio’s approach.

If you’re at a smaller indie studio, congratulations: you’re already part of the future of the industry. Be wary of ambitions to build the next big AAA studio. Most great franchises were born from small games and incremental investment. This is far from easy in a crowded market, but it’s the path to sustainable success.

Brandon Dillon

Co-founder, 2weeks, a new independent game development studio building experimental games on the open web for you and your friends.