Astro Bot director: "It's OK to make a small game"

With gamer backlogs growing bigger than ever, it becomes beneficial to make something you can wrap up over a weekend.

It seems that the days of games bragging about how many hundreds of hours they take to complete are starting to be over. Sure, a game like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II or Baldur's Gate III can demand those hours, but when you stack up how many massive RPGs are released in a given year, it becomes clear you'll never play them all.

Nicolas Doucet, director of 2024's GOTY winner at The Game Awards Astro Bot, recently spoke at a panel at GDC (thanks, GamesRadar), saying that games don't need to be massive nowadays.

"From the start, we were in the mindset that it's OK to make a compact game ... it's OK to make a small game," he said. "So for us, it means that we're making something of such scale that we can control it fully. That's from a development standpoint. But not only that. For the players, we all know that players today have a backlog of games and cannot complete their games, so the prospect of a game you can actually complete is a really persuasive argument."

While you might not get an hour equal to each dollar you spend on a game like Astro Bot, the focus and enjoyment provided might mean you're alright not having reams of dialogue to go over or a massive map to explore every inch of.

Do you prefer smaller or bigger games?