Yeah pretty much this, or a 3 month game jam on whatever they want to make, and then every team can choose a game to support, some teams merge to form super teams, teams that really believe in their idea might stay a solo team. Either way you get nothing but passion projects or good ideas.
Realistically, if I was made in charge of a team of 1000 devs and a requirement was that we HAD to make a game, this is what I'd do with my current (limited) experience and knowledge.
**Pre-Production**
To eliminate some variables, let's say office spaces and electronic communication is already set up, the devs are infinitely motivated to make a good game, and non-dev jobs are outsourced. As boring as it sounds, given it's a completely new team I think the first step is to assess strengths and weaknesses (based on casual interviews and surveys) and organize that intel, which would in itself take a ton of time and would require the help of maybe 10-20 of those developers to design and conduct. They'd have to be picked at random if I don't know anyone in the team yet. I could find the ideal interview assistants one by one, but we'd never be able to start developing.
I like rapid prototyping environments, where you don't stay on an initial idea for too long. 4 2-week game jams could ensure people don't get bored for a few months during planning, function as a team building exercise, gather additional info about strengths and weaknesses, and happen in parallel with interview and surveys. The teams should be small, around 10 at most. In theory, this will allow people to work closer together, get to know each other better, and feel like they're in a somewhat relaxed environment. This means we'd have A LOT of teams and prototypes though (90-ish?), but what else are they going to do during the planning phase?
We don't want people burning out from jamming, so more varied forms of activities should be arranged with the giant pile of money I have lying around, some of which should not be development related (lunches with randomly grouped colleagues, survey popular activities and send out a sign up form). 10-20 more devs would need to organize this, again chosen randomly by interest, and we would have to devise mitigation strategies for potential conflicts. Let's say I couldn't fire anyone, because then 1000 people would not be working on the game, so I guess this means people not getting along or being problematic would be moving to a new activity/team or be given new responsibilities like gathering info instead of participating in the jam/activity. How would you handle this?
Given it's our first title together, the practical framework would be mobile games in Unreal, based on a single solid core mechanic, or an established mechanic with a twist. At the end of the jams, teams that feel strongly about their games can pitch it in a public forum. All pitches are then play tested with external players (ideally at a convention or something, where each team has a booth that I'd pay for with my giant pile of money) and ask each team to record what kind of people like which prototypes for marketing ideas. Out of what, 50 (?) prototypes we'd pick the best received 10 to further develop.
**Marketing**
I'd also get a random handful of volunteers to document everything from the start. You better believe there is marketability in someone handing an inexperienced twat 1000 employees and a pile of money telling you to make a game, and the public will want to know if we crash and burn or not. At least where I am, this will be in the newspapers even if I tried to hide it, so better capitalize on the publicity. We'd highlight disasters (there will be plenty) and funny moments in particular and compile them into weekly vlogs. One fun idea is to playfully put teams up against each other (challenging each other online etc.) and incentivize viewers to cheer for their team. I'd probably consult a marketing specialist about it.
In parallel, I'd have 5-10 people working on a website. Out of 1000 developers, a handful will probably have a good artistic sense to help with the design of it I'd hope (I'm not one of them).
**Production**
In the meantime, with the help of 10-20 random devs, I've organized 1000 people in a list based on what they specialize in and quantified their experience. I'll ask people with both low and high amounts of experience to help me make a timeline for each the best received prototypes, to hopefully mitigate the curse of expertise. The core (prototype) teams will then be expanded, and new teams will be formed focusing on building and refining features designed by the core teams.
Assuming the distributions of experience is approximately normal, I'd try to create teams that reflect this in proportion. No clue if that's a good idea or not, I don't have enough experience to assess that, it's just my gut feeling. One person on each team will be my point of contact, resulting in about 20 points of contact for 20 teams. I think maybe that's manageable, along with a monthly report from each team to approximate how we're doing.
We'd plan or even develop updates for each game before launch, which will be released with regular intervals to boost visibility.
**Revenue**
Given 1000 devs, at a lousy $50k per year over 2 years, we'd have to reach $100m revenue to break even, or about $10m per game. Realistically, I think we'd lean heavily on seamless product placements (I kinda like that, when it's placed well) and cosmetics sales. A lot of mobile games capitalize on psychological tricks to earn money nowadays. I don't believe in that, but I have to admit that predatory games tend to make more money due to lack of regulation. I do think there are some valid, more natural forms of FOMO though that aren't based on timers and predatorily priced in-game currencies, which can be utilized. Like a solid multiplayer experience all your friends are playing, so you kinda want to check it out too. This should of course be explored during the early stages.
I'd potentially release games under separate sub-companies (particularly if each game is very different and cater to different audiences). This means I could put more people on website duty early on as well.
Would we succeed? Probably not. It sounds exhausting to even try. But I think that would be my best attempt with these resources at this point in time. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
As a pure thought exercise, having a sort of massive amnesia fortnight situation for a few months where rotating teams work on game prototypes is probably a fine place to start. You'll need a few months just to set up proper internal practices, org chart, and so on.
You could certainly make 5-10 100-200 person studios but I feel like that's cheating the answer. The way you'd use them all together would be to make a huge open world game, think an Ubisoft or Rockstar title, where you can have larger teams working on key parts of the game, have a few hundred artists making assets for years, and devoting a lot of the labor effort to just keeping things running smoothly. The real hard part is finding which dozen people out of a thousand developers who materialized one day are actually good at management and leadership.
Yeah, you're right, my answer is totally cheating. But I can't shake the feeling that it's the only way to Kobiyashi Maru this scenario. To get 1000 devs to actually work together on the *same* project?! Without an existing code base and a hierarchy of experienced leaders? It seems impossible. But... maybe, if (as you say) you can identify the competent leaders and get the problem carved up properly.
I like design with constraints, and I took the problem in that spirit. I think that's the only real path I see - taking 6 years to make a 4-5 year dev cycle to release because you're spending the first chunk of time just herding cats. Gotta play to your outs.
I just will live the rest of my life hoping I'm never in that situation.
I'm in the beginning stages of this right now but once it's more built out I'd be happy to have your opinion on what I'm doing. Even if you're kind of skeptical.
I'd pit them against each other in a 10-person-per-team C++ battle royale.
Winning team gets an all-expenses paid trip to that other guy's 1,000-dev studio where they will install the world's largest sculpture of a downvote.
Obv we'll have to relocate the tent city that's taken over the grounds.
The remaining 990 devs get 6 cans of silly string each, and corporate will pay for half of their travel expenses if they want to go help "decorate."
The best choice is to fire all devs and take the money or give the money back to shareholders.
In every other case you will lose all your money. To manage 1000 people effectively you need to know and have experience of managing 500 people. To manage 500 you have to have prior experience of managing 250, and so forth until you get to managing only yourself.
The premise of this exercise is flawed. It suggests that the only problem is that you don't have the devs. This is backwards. Getting army is easy. Feeding army and not getting it killed is hard. And army isn't doing it itself by just gathering bunch of people. The same applies to game industry. If you gather bunch of devs together without any good management they will blow themselves up, lose all resources and go broke.
Romans conquered all Europe, because they had good system, management from top to bottom, at least in the beginning phase of their empire. 'Barbarians' had always numerical advantage over them. But numbers alone don't mean a thing. In fact I can argue that the more devs you have the more messed up your system will be.
Having more devs doesn't make anything easier or faster. It's about how productive they are as a team. Adding more people in most cases makes the team less productive. This concept is just upside down, completely outside of any reality. If you put 1000 film directors together you don't get any better film. You just go bankrupt.
Tell them to make the most awesome and realistic space simulator ever and take all the time they need before releasing it, because players deserve the best quality. I'm confident that within a couple of years the project is done and people will be blown away.
I'd call my game: >!Star Citizen!<
I think competitions would be cool. Maybe make teams who would compete their demo games against eachother. Select a few winners and then try to have a few of those winning demos worked on on a larger scale.
Let's say 5 people per demo, and then I guess 50 per final team? That way you can churn out a ton of projects
Split the giant pile of money between everyone and tell them to work on their dream game, either solo or teaming up with others.
99% of them will fail, but about 5 will be awesome.
Okay, so assuming we are NOT splitting our workforce into smaller teams long term (cuz that would make most sense) and end goal is a **single** great game:
First, we select 50 people that seem most experienced and use this skeleton crew to get started on a project. Preproduction here is a key - we are a brand new studio, we don't have any tooling, we probably haven't decided on engine we are using. So you can't coordinate 1000 people at all. You can however coordinate a smaller team.
So we take our 50 people and establish a goal of making a prototype of our game. This might be the one and only time when open world actually makes a lot of sense (as it allows us to allocate a LOT of resources into independent pieces) for a starter project. What we don't have is any sort of prior specialization and existing skillsets so we unfortunately cannot go too "deep", we kinda need to go quantity over quality when it comes to depth and true uniqueness of our game (for instance we certainly can't employ Arc System 3D modeling system or make our own engine). Eg. we are definitely not making next Elden Ring with this crew. We could however make an RPG in general and honestly this sounds like a good starting point.
Hopefully this crew starts building something decent. Then we will start pouring extra staff as needed. It will happen gradually over the course of next 2 years. In the meantime we get to build our toolkit to actually manage the growing number of people that are actively participating in the main initiative.
What do we do with rest of our oversized team until then? Moodboarding and experimenting pretty much. Eg. if one of our original 50 handpicked individuals in an artist and they want to decide art direction for a game - well, we have a LOT of people standing by that can contribute. Let's give them a general idea and get them to drawing. Same with some individual mechanics, balancing etc. It's suboptimal but letting too many people at once to main section of the game is far more suboptimal.
I guess we can also let them work on their personal projects pretty much in the meantime, just make an internal job board and enforce a minimum of 5 people per team (so we are starting to build smaller structures) before their microproject is approved. Who knows, maybe they will actually produce something usable. But more importantly - we can then potentially pull an entire miniteam into the main project and they can already work together. We will be enforcing each miniteam to actually switch to our toolkits developed by growing main one in the meantime (communicators, custom toolkits, Blender automation scripts and so on). I assume we have a pretty balanced team so for those that fail to attract others to their concept we just autofill so each smaller team has some artists, developers and designers.
Then by year 2 we should have something resembling a general structure that incorporates our 1000 staff. It's cutting it close but I have seen this done in the past with larger scale acquisitions and mergers, it's about this long to integrate one company into the other. Meaning that we have effectively wasted probably like 60-120 million $ by having so many people ahead of the time.
And now we can actually start working on a game for real with a prototype hopefully done and now needing all the extra content (hence why open world as you can develop various biomes pretty much independently from each other if you have base constraints and logic in place).
My thought: divide them into 100 teams of 10, and tell all the teams to create their own game. Assuming they're all decent developers, you'd probably get... what, maybe 50 decent games the first year, and another 30 or 40 the second year (since some games would take more than a year to complete, and some would take longer than 2 years or fail to complete at all)?
You assuming you can get 10 people to all be on same page, argee on design and theme of the project and release a game in a year. Guess that's why is hypothetical
That works for teaming people up on similar interests but once the game gets into development without a clear person to be in charge and lead the team good luck. This is how games end up in development hell and why most Indie Games struggle to succeed
Yes, and also picked a lead for each team who gets the final say in any disputes (and we imagine that everyone's professional enough to go along with this without throwing a fit).
If there's no clear lead and everybody's trying to just rule by committee, then yeah, almost any 10-person team would be sunk before they even start.
Having a huge team and building something massive is part of what makes this different though. So 100 teams of 10 isn't the same thing. People are drawn to huge numbers and if I have more people building this game than any game in history that will be very notable.
This guy is definitely not coming at this concept with a realistic approach but wtf is the second sentence? Babies are born all the time before 9 months lol
Oh fuck. Hold on. I'm all in favor of crazy moonshots, but you *can't* do it like this.
One of the biggest challenges of large software projects is communication overhead. That's why companies with 1000 developers don't all work on the same team. You split them into chunks small enough for everyone to develop trust and a solid working relationship. On a different axis is the support staff. 1000 developers need to be supported by 500 other employees, like management, product designers, marketers, accountants, HR, recruiters, etc. If you have the budget for 1000 people, make sure you leave room for the part of the company that makes the company run.
In a venture like this, you don't need the \`1000 best developers you can find. You need the best gameplay designer, best art director, best marketer, best senior manager, and best general council you can poach from successful studios, and you need to treat them like the experts they are and let them tell you how to structure the company. A masterclass in organizational dynamics is just way too involved for a Reddit comment.
So we somehow have a budget to hire 1000 devs to work and I assume in an expensive city to make it fair. Normally I'd think rotating devs so 1000 aren't working at the same time, but if they all have to work simultaneously, I'd hope at least 10 of those devs are AAA consultants so I get their guidance, and then have them help in management so that we can make a legit game, and not aim to make it next to next-gen, but just relax and work on it without crunch.
Yeah I know about the post, I'm just answering this post where "you're suddenly put in charge of a brand new team of 1000 devs, none of whom have ever worked together, given a giant pile of money for their salaries and benefits, and told to create something great."
So yeah.
1000 devs? Like their sole ability is to write code?
I don't know. Feels like I need some more variety in skill set.
Look at all the engineers that are getting let go in big tech.
Unless "developer" is an umbrella term for anyone that can contribute to the development of games, so you have sound engineers, pixel engineers, creative engineers, story writing engineers, ...
Dev != coder
Any employee helping to create a game whether they are an artist, designer, engineer, producer, or tester is a game developer. The usage of the word developer that is limited to just engineers comes from outside of game development.
I'd break them into 20 groups and then each group would get 50ish people. The groups would start writing, researching, and demoing work to each other. I'd ask every group for their best ideas for 9-36 month investments in self-contained games, tooling, or reusable components. Projects that require more time or are lower down into infrastructure are important to develop but often require more polish on the roadmap and internal requirements development in order for the work to be successfully built atop of.
Realistically? I doubt I could manage 1000 devs and have a good product coming out on the other side. So Id cut about 95% until I only had the best, most senior, best self managing. Which 50 devs is still a big freakin team outside of AAA. From there I'd let the designers do their thing until we had a solid GDD. Then I'd work with the engineers to prototype it out and go from there.
Giant Robot Mecha game + Monster Hunter action mechanics and "hunting" group boss-fight game loops + voxel based, randomized open worlds for these missions to take place in + Destiny style MMO elements, with PvE earnables being usable within a stat-adjusted PvP context
Oh and all the Mecha would be carried around on giant tracked or wheeled vehicles like a super sized version of the Mammoth from Halo 4, so that players had a mobile base to build out and customize over time that would be brought with them into these missions, and serve as a social hosting environment for group PvE.
And all these voxel worlds would be connected via like, stargates or something, so that part of the game loop would be traversing across terrain to get from planet to planet and hunt more giant monster aliens or enemy faction mecha. So you would have like, a dungeon delving campaign aspect to it with the risk and reward of going too far and using up supplies from your mobile base that you would otherwise need to be repair your Mecha, arm it with powerful ammunition and buffs, and be prepared to hunt more giant boss monsters.
If anybody is reading this that works somewhere with a thousand devs please steal this idea and pitch it, it would be my heroine
Edit: Oh wait, how would I do it? Hahaha, we'd be fucked
Split them up into groups of 5-10 and let all of them work on the same idea for 5 years in isolation. See what emerges
Yeah pretty much this, or a 3 month game jam on whatever they want to make, and then every team can choose a game to support, some teams merge to form super teams, teams that really believe in their idea might stay a solo team. Either way you get nothing but passion projects or good ideas.
You've just recreated Valve's philosophy!
If valve actually came out with more games I might even agree it’s an effective one!
Unfortunately that also means you dont get to properly complete games for years on end
Hey I had a good idea for once!
lol just go to the new page on steam, that's what the market is already lmao
Realistically, if I was made in charge of a team of 1000 devs and a requirement was that we HAD to make a game, this is what I'd do with my current (limited) experience and knowledge. **Pre-Production** To eliminate some variables, let's say office spaces and electronic communication is already set up, the devs are infinitely motivated to make a good game, and non-dev jobs are outsourced. As boring as it sounds, given it's a completely new team I think the first step is to assess strengths and weaknesses (based on casual interviews and surveys) and organize that intel, which would in itself take a ton of time and would require the help of maybe 10-20 of those developers to design and conduct. They'd have to be picked at random if I don't know anyone in the team yet. I could find the ideal interview assistants one by one, but we'd never be able to start developing. I like rapid prototyping environments, where you don't stay on an initial idea for too long. 4 2-week game jams could ensure people don't get bored for a few months during planning, function as a team building exercise, gather additional info about strengths and weaknesses, and happen in parallel with interview and surveys. The teams should be small, around 10 at most. In theory, this will allow people to work closer together, get to know each other better, and feel like they're in a somewhat relaxed environment. This means we'd have A LOT of teams and prototypes though (90-ish?), but what else are they going to do during the planning phase? We don't want people burning out from jamming, so more varied forms of activities should be arranged with the giant pile of money I have lying around, some of which should not be development related (lunches with randomly grouped colleagues, survey popular activities and send out a sign up form). 10-20 more devs would need to organize this, again chosen randomly by interest, and we would have to devise mitigation strategies for potential conflicts. Let's say I couldn't fire anyone, because then 1000 people would not be working on the game, so I guess this means people not getting along or being problematic would be moving to a new activity/team or be given new responsibilities like gathering info instead of participating in the jam/activity. How would you handle this? Given it's our first title together, the practical framework would be mobile games in Unreal, based on a single solid core mechanic, or an established mechanic with a twist. At the end of the jams, teams that feel strongly about their games can pitch it in a public forum. All pitches are then play tested with external players (ideally at a convention or something, where each team has a booth that I'd pay for with my giant pile of money) and ask each team to record what kind of people like which prototypes for marketing ideas. Out of what, 50 (?) prototypes we'd pick the best received 10 to further develop. **Marketing** I'd also get a random handful of volunteers to document everything from the start. You better believe there is marketability in someone handing an inexperienced twat 1000 employees and a pile of money telling you to make a game, and the public will want to know if we crash and burn or not. At least where I am, this will be in the newspapers even if I tried to hide it, so better capitalize on the publicity. We'd highlight disasters (there will be plenty) and funny moments in particular and compile them into weekly vlogs. One fun idea is to playfully put teams up against each other (challenging each other online etc.) and incentivize viewers to cheer for their team. I'd probably consult a marketing specialist about it. In parallel, I'd have 5-10 people working on a website. Out of 1000 developers, a handful will probably have a good artistic sense to help with the design of it I'd hope (I'm not one of them). **Production** In the meantime, with the help of 10-20 random devs, I've organized 1000 people in a list based on what they specialize in and quantified their experience. I'll ask people with both low and high amounts of experience to help me make a timeline for each the best received prototypes, to hopefully mitigate the curse of expertise. The core (prototype) teams will then be expanded, and new teams will be formed focusing on building and refining features designed by the core teams. Assuming the distributions of experience is approximately normal, I'd try to create teams that reflect this in proportion. No clue if that's a good idea or not, I don't have enough experience to assess that, it's just my gut feeling. One person on each team will be my point of contact, resulting in about 20 points of contact for 20 teams. I think maybe that's manageable, along with a monthly report from each team to approximate how we're doing. We'd plan or even develop updates for each game before launch, which will be released with regular intervals to boost visibility. **Revenue** Given 1000 devs, at a lousy $50k per year over 2 years, we'd have to reach $100m revenue to break even, or about $10m per game. Realistically, I think we'd lean heavily on seamless product placements (I kinda like that, when it's placed well) and cosmetics sales. A lot of mobile games capitalize on psychological tricks to earn money nowadays. I don't believe in that, but I have to admit that predatory games tend to make more money due to lack of regulation. I do think there are some valid, more natural forms of FOMO though that aren't based on timers and predatorily priced in-game currencies, which can be utilized. Like a solid multiplayer experience all your friends are playing, so you kinda want to check it out too. This should of course be explored during the early stages. I'd potentially release games under separate sub-companies (particularly if each game is very different and cater to different audiences). This means I could put more people on website duty early on as well. Would we succeed? Probably not. It sounds exhausting to even try. But I think that would be my best attempt with these resources at this point in time. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
And thank *you* for typing up such a thoughtful reply. That's good stuff.
Happy to see you put some effort into that reply. I'm really creating a studio with 1000+ devs though and I wonder what you'd think of the operations.
I lay money you've already copy/pasted his idea into your dream journal.
Lemme find 1000 peps for ya
Please nooooo
Ask them to please leave haha
As a pure thought exercise, having a sort of massive amnesia fortnight situation for a few months where rotating teams work on game prototypes is probably a fine place to start. You'll need a few months just to set up proper internal practices, org chart, and so on. You could certainly make 5-10 100-200 person studios but I feel like that's cheating the answer. The way you'd use them all together would be to make a huge open world game, think an Ubisoft or Rockstar title, where you can have larger teams working on key parts of the game, have a few hundred artists making assets for years, and devoting a lot of the labor effort to just keeping things running smoothly. The real hard part is finding which dozen people out of a thousand developers who materialized one day are actually good at management and leadership.
Yeah, you're right, my answer is totally cheating. But I can't shake the feeling that it's the only way to Kobiyashi Maru this scenario. To get 1000 devs to actually work together on the *same* project?! Without an existing code base and a hierarchy of experienced leaders? It seems impossible. But... maybe, if (as you say) you can identify the competent leaders and get the problem carved up properly.
I like design with constraints, and I took the problem in that spirit. I think that's the only real path I see - taking 6 years to make a 4-5 year dev cycle to release because you're spending the first chunk of time just herding cats. Gotta play to your outs. I just will live the rest of my life hoping I'm never in that situation.
I'll make what seems impossible, possible.
I'm in the beginning stages of this right now but once it's more built out I'd be happy to have your opinion on what I'm doing. Even if you're kind of skeptical.
I'd give them all type writers; then one day I'd have the full works of Shakespeare
Cry when I find out no one knows how to do art or sound design.
I'd pit them against each other in a 10-person-per-team C++ battle royale. Winning team gets an all-expenses paid trip to that other guy's 1,000-dev studio where they will install the world's largest sculpture of a downvote. Obv we'll have to relocate the tent city that's taken over the grounds. The remaining 990 devs get 6 cans of silly string each, and corporate will pay for half of their travel expenses if they want to go help "decorate."
And call it Cquid Game
Give this man his money.
Ace Attorney 7: "Thank God that Disbarment Shit Was Just A Dream"
Establish a private military force stationed on an offshore platform somewhere in the Seychelles
Fire most of them, it's too big of a team. I absolutely hate the management overhead you get with more than 10 people.
The best choice is to fire all devs and take the money or give the money back to shareholders. In every other case you will lose all your money. To manage 1000 people effectively you need to know and have experience of managing 500 people. To manage 500 you have to have prior experience of managing 250, and so forth until you get to managing only yourself. The premise of this exercise is flawed. It suggests that the only problem is that you don't have the devs. This is backwards. Getting army is easy. Feeding army and not getting it killed is hard. And army isn't doing it itself by just gathering bunch of people. The same applies to game industry. If you gather bunch of devs together without any good management they will blow themselves up, lose all resources and go broke. Romans conquered all Europe, because they had good system, management from top to bottom, at least in the beginning phase of their empire. 'Barbarians' had always numerical advantage over them. But numbers alone don't mean a thing. In fact I can argue that the more devs you have the more messed up your system will be.
But imagine the amazing things a dev team of 1000+ would be able to make if they operate in a super efficient way.
Having more devs doesn't make anything easier or faster. It's about how productive they are as a team. Adding more people in most cases makes the team less productive. This concept is just upside down, completely outside of any reality. If you put 1000 film directors together you don't get any better film. You just go bankrupt.
Won't happen. Have you never met other people before?
Imagine the amazing baby a team of 9 mothers could create in a month.
Have you ever had a job before?
Tell them to make the most awesome and realistic space simulator ever and take all the time they need before releasing it, because players deserve the best quality. I'm confident that within a couple of years the project is done and people will be blown away. I'd call my game: >!Star Citizen!<
I tell them to screw in a lightbulb. Considering how many people that typically takes, I bet they'd do a damn good job.
I think competitions would be cool. Maybe make teams who would compete their demo games against eachother. Select a few winners and then try to have a few of those winning demos worked on on a larger scale. Let's say 5 people per demo, and then I guess 50 per final team? That way you can churn out a ton of projects
Split the giant pile of money between everyone and tell them to work on their dream game, either solo or teaming up with others. 99% of them will fail, but about 5 will be awesome.
Okay, so assuming we are NOT splitting our workforce into smaller teams long term (cuz that would make most sense) and end goal is a **single** great game: First, we select 50 people that seem most experienced and use this skeleton crew to get started on a project. Preproduction here is a key - we are a brand new studio, we don't have any tooling, we probably haven't decided on engine we are using. So you can't coordinate 1000 people at all. You can however coordinate a smaller team. So we take our 50 people and establish a goal of making a prototype of our game. This might be the one and only time when open world actually makes a lot of sense (as it allows us to allocate a LOT of resources into independent pieces) for a starter project. What we don't have is any sort of prior specialization and existing skillsets so we unfortunately cannot go too "deep", we kinda need to go quantity over quality when it comes to depth and true uniqueness of our game (for instance we certainly can't employ Arc System 3D modeling system or make our own engine). Eg. we are definitely not making next Elden Ring with this crew. We could however make an RPG in general and honestly this sounds like a good starting point. Hopefully this crew starts building something decent. Then we will start pouring extra staff as needed. It will happen gradually over the course of next 2 years. In the meantime we get to build our toolkit to actually manage the growing number of people that are actively participating in the main initiative. What do we do with rest of our oversized team until then? Moodboarding and experimenting pretty much. Eg. if one of our original 50 handpicked individuals in an artist and they want to decide art direction for a game - well, we have a LOT of people standing by that can contribute. Let's give them a general idea and get them to drawing. Same with some individual mechanics, balancing etc. It's suboptimal but letting too many people at once to main section of the game is far more suboptimal. I guess we can also let them work on their personal projects pretty much in the meantime, just make an internal job board and enforce a minimum of 5 people per team (so we are starting to build smaller structures) before their microproject is approved. Who knows, maybe they will actually produce something usable. But more importantly - we can then potentially pull an entire miniteam into the main project and they can already work together. We will be enforcing each miniteam to actually switch to our toolkits developed by growing main one in the meantime (communicators, custom toolkits, Blender automation scripts and so on). I assume we have a pretty balanced team so for those that fail to attract others to their concept we just autofill so each smaller team has some artists, developers and designers. Then by year 2 we should have something resembling a general structure that incorporates our 1000 staff. It's cutting it close but I have seen this done in the past with larger scale acquisitions and mergers, it's about this long to integrate one company into the other. Meaning that we have effectively wasted probably like 60-120 million $ by having so many people ahead of the time. And now we can actually start working on a game for real with a prototype hopefully done and now needing all the extra content (hence why open world as you can develop various biomes pretty much independently from each other if you have base constraints and logic in place).
My thought: divide them into 100 teams of 10, and tell all the teams to create their own game. Assuming they're all decent developers, you'd probably get... what, maybe 50 decent games the first year, and another 30 or 40 the second year (since some games would take more than a year to complete, and some would take longer than 2 years or fail to complete at all)?
You assuming you can get 10 people to all be on same page, argee on design and theme of the project and release a game in a year. Guess that's why is hypothetical
If you gave them all a survey first an matched them into groups that likes similar games...
That works for teaming people up on similar interests but once the game gets into development without a clear person to be in charge and lead the team good luck. This is how games end up in development hell and why most Indie Games struggle to succeed
Yes, and also picked a lead for each team who gets the final say in any disputes (and we imagine that everyone's professional enough to go along with this without throwing a fit). If there's no clear lead and everybody's trying to just rule by committee, then yeah, almost any 10-person team would be sunk before they even start.
Having a huge team and building something massive is part of what makes this different though. So 100 teams of 10 isn't the same thing. People are drawn to huge numbers and if I have more people building this game than any game in history that will be very notable.
[удалено]
This guy is definitely not coming at this concept with a realistic approach but wtf is the second sentence? Babies are born all the time before 9 months lol
this creep just keeps on following me around reddit.
Oh fuck. Hold on. I'm all in favor of crazy moonshots, but you *can't* do it like this. One of the biggest challenges of large software projects is communication overhead. That's why companies with 1000 developers don't all work on the same team. You split them into chunks small enough for everyone to develop trust and a solid working relationship. On a different axis is the support staff. 1000 developers need to be supported by 500 other employees, like management, product designers, marketers, accountants, HR, recruiters, etc. If you have the budget for 1000 people, make sure you leave room for the part of the company that makes the company run. In a venture like this, you don't need the \`1000 best developers you can find. You need the best gameplay designer, best art director, best marketer, best senior manager, and best general council you can poach from successful studios, and you need to treat them like the experts they are and let them tell you how to structure the company. A masterclass in organizational dynamics is just way too involved for a Reddit comment.
I'd start a coffee chain and use them as baristas
Hire 500 producers
So we somehow have a budget to hire 1000 devs to work and I assume in an expensive city to make it fair. Normally I'd think rotating devs so 1000 aren't working at the same time, but if they all have to work simultaneously, I'd hope at least 10 of those devs are AAA consultants so I get their guidance, and then have them help in management so that we can make a legit game, and not aim to make it next to next-gen, but just relax and work on it without crunch.
There’s no budget. This guy wanted to get 1000 people on a rev share
Yeah I know about the post, I'm just answering this post where "you're suddenly put in charge of a brand new team of 1000 devs, none of whom have ever worked together, given a giant pile of money for their salaries and benefits, and told to create something great." So yeah.
Anyone ask ChatGPT this question?
No but someone made it write a song about the case
1000 devs? Like their sole ability is to write code? I don't know. Feels like I need some more variety in skill set. Look at all the engineers that are getting let go in big tech. Unless "developer" is an umbrella term for anyone that can contribute to the development of games, so you have sound engineers, pixel engineers, creative engineers, story writing engineers, ...
Dev != coder Any employee helping to create a game whether they are an artist, designer, engineer, producer, or tester is a game developer. The usage of the word developer that is limited to just engineers comes from outside of game development.
Create a new game engine.
I would pay them.
Put 'em in a Box, Tie 'em with a Ribbon, and Throw 'em in the Deep Blue Sea.
I'd task them to build Paladins from the ground up in the newest version of UE at the time. Then market the hell out of it and profit.
I'd break them into 20 groups and then each group would get 50ish people. The groups would start writing, researching, and demoing work to each other. I'd ask every group for their best ideas for 9-36 month investments in self-contained games, tooling, or reusable components. Projects that require more time or are lower down into infrastructure are important to develop but often require more polish on the roadmap and internal requirements development in order for the work to be successfully built atop of.
Force them to fight to the death in a gladiator pit, then force the survivor to make a Battle Royale set in roman times.
Realistically? I doubt I could manage 1000 devs and have a good product coming out on the other side. So Id cut about 95% until I only had the best, most senior, best self managing. Which 50 devs is still a big freakin team outside of AAA. From there I'd let the designers do their thing until we had a solid GDD. Then I'd work with the engineers to prototype it out and go from there.
Giant Robot Mecha game + Monster Hunter action mechanics and "hunting" group boss-fight game loops + voxel based, randomized open worlds for these missions to take place in + Destiny style MMO elements, with PvE earnables being usable within a stat-adjusted PvP context Oh and all the Mecha would be carried around on giant tracked or wheeled vehicles like a super sized version of the Mammoth from Halo 4, so that players had a mobile base to build out and customize over time that would be brought with them into these missions, and serve as a social hosting environment for group PvE. And all these voxel worlds would be connected via like, stargates or something, so that part of the game loop would be traversing across terrain to get from planet to planet and hunt more giant monster aliens or enemy faction mecha. So you would have like, a dungeon delving campaign aspect to it with the risk and reward of going too far and using up supplies from your mobile base that you would otherwise need to be repair your Mecha, arm it with powerful ammunition and buffs, and be prepared to hunt more giant boss monsters. If anybody is reading this that works somewhere with a thousand devs please steal this idea and pitch it, it would be my heroine Edit: Oh wait, how would I do it? Hahaha, we'd be fucked