Former Assassin’s Creed director Alexandre Amancio recently offered a stark assessment of the current crisis facing AAA game development, outlining pathways to revitalizing an industry plagued by creative stagnation and mass layoffs. Speaking at DevGAMM Lisbon, Amancio argued for a fundamental shift away from over-expansion and risk-averse thinking, emphasizing the urgent need to fix AAA development. His insights, born from years at Ubisoft, challenge conventional wisdom about large-scale game production.
Amancio, now senior vice-president of world-building and IP strategy at FunPlus, previously served as creative director for titles like Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and Assassin’s Creed: Unity. This background provides him unique perspective on the complexities of managing massive productions involving hundreds of developers. He contends that the Western games industry is in crisis, having prioritized “politics over craft” and “content pipelines over originality,” a sentiment echoed by many across the sector as detailed by GamesIndustry.biz.
This current predicament, he explains, stems from a decade of over-expansion and studio bloat, leading to a disconnect between creators and their games. The pursuit of metrics over greatness has stifled innovation and efficiency, making the process of game creation, which he likens to a “wicked problem” with inherently variable inputs, even more challenging. The industry’s struggle is not new, but the scale of the recent fallout demands immediate reevaluation of established practices.
The pitfalls of large teams and the search for efficiency
Amancio challenges the notion that larger teams inherently lead to better or faster development, asserting that the future of AAA development lies in smaller, more agile units. He points to a critical threshold around 100 people, beyond which the dynamics of a project drastically change, leading to an explosion in management overhead. “Adding people to a problem stagnates the people that were already being efficient on it,” he notes, emphasizing how larger teams often introduce more “variable noise” rather than solutions.
He suggests that the gaming industry can learn from the film industry’s model, which relies on coalesced core teams complemented by temporary crews, outsourcing, or co-development for specific needs. This approach allows for assembling “the right crew for the right project at the right time,” optimizing resources and fostering a more focused creative environment. This contrasts sharply with the software industry’s traditional scaling by simply adding more engineers, a model the gaming world has mistakenly adopted, as highlighted in a recent analysis by Game Developer. Such a shift could significantly enhance how studios fix AAA development by streamlining workflows.
Reimagining production and fostering true innovation
One significant challenge in game development, particularly when aiming for innovation, involves building and discovering elements concurrently, a departure from the film industry’s more linear, script-driven process. Amancio uses the analogy of a train: the core team acts as the locomotive, while different sections (trades) attempt to move at their own speeds. This inherent conflict often results in a “huge train that’s tearing itself apart,” hindering progress and creative flow.
To address this, Amancio advocates for establishing “choke points” to manage complexity and “floodgates” that ensure a methodical, one-way flow through the development process. This structured approach, while allowing for emergent fun and discovery, aims to prevent the chaotic divergence often seen in large productions. The goal is to cultivate environments where creative vision can thrive without being overwhelmed by logistical sprawl, a strategy supported by studies on project management in creative industries, such as those found in the Harvard Business Review.
Alexandre Amancio’s critique offers a compelling roadmap for the struggling AAA sector. By re-evaluating team structures, embracing flexibility through outsourcing, and implementing disciplined production methodologies, developers can move beyond chasing metrics to rediscover creative greatness. The industry’s future, he implies, belongs to those bold enough to challenge entrenched practices and foster environments where innovation and craft are paramount, ensuring a more sustainable and creatively rich landscape for game development.
