How do we "fix" AAA gaming? It's a question a lot of people have asked, and with 2025 showing off a fantastic year for AA and indies, it seems that now the question is only more important. According to Assassin's Creed veteran and former director Alexandre Amancio, the issue is one that cannot be solved with more developers.
"There's this theory that says that whenever humans create something that surpasses a hundred people, it completely changes the dynamic of it," Amancio told Gamesindustry.biz in a recent interview. "As soon as you surpass that, the ratio of management to people working on the game explodes. You start having a very management-heavy structure: You need to have people to coordinate the people coordinating."
"Something that a lot of AAA studios mistakenly do, or certainly did in the past, is think that you can solve a problem by throwing people at it," he continued. "But adding people to a problem stagnates the people that were already being efficient on it. It just creates a lot of variable noise."
The future therefore lies in smaller teams, according to Amancio. We've certainly seen small teams create big and impressive games. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Hollow Knight: Silksong are great examples. But, as we continue to see mass layoffs in the gaming industry, it might be disheartening for some budding developers to hear that less may be the new more when it comes to development teams. Still, Amancio thinks there may be space for more people, but it could be the games industry adopts a film approach.
"The film industry evolved into coalesced, core teams in which each person is responsible for putting together a crew to help them on that project. That crew typically is built for that project, it's a temporary crew, although of course people get people that they want to work with long term: they have their go-to people for various kinds of projects," he said.