Between a Sifu-like brawler evidently made by one developer and a mere nine friends and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s development team purportedly being less than 30 people – it’s not, even if we are just talking about the core Sandfall staff – the Summer Game Fest live kickoff was both fixated on, and wrong about, how many people made some games.
“My favorite part was ‘solo developer, with the help of 9 of his friends,'” said Tyler Glaiel, of The End is Nigh and Bombernauts.
Indie hits like REPO and Schedule 1 got a shoutout early in the show, with host Geoff Keighley celebrating their ability to match and even outpace AAA giants despite their small development teams. These hugely popular games were, indeed, made by small teams, and it’s great to see them reach this level of acclaim.
But this narrative seemed to balloon throughout the show, with purely hypothetical teams getting smaller and smaller as if to embellish the relationship between how many people make a game and how good or successful that game is. Everyone loves an underdog, right? On our current course, we’ll soon praise games developed by just one embryo in the womb.
Balatro’s Localthunk worries this juxtaposition plays into a “David vs. Goliath narrative.” It may wrongly pit devs against each other and make a spectacle of who can have the smallest team.
“People and media often say Balatro was made by ‘one guy,'” he posted on Bluesky. “I feel like that unfortunately may be stoking the flames of this David vs. Goliath narrative a tiny bit. No it was not ‘one guy’, look at the dang in-game credits.” (I’ll cop to it now: we have said “Balatro creator“, and we’re definitely not alone. We’ll get to that.)
Looking at the dang credits is a useful solution to this unnecessary debate. Think of the best-known ‘solo,’ which often really means most visible, devs of the past decade or so. Undertale’s Toby Fox? Countless other artists, designers, localizers, programmers, producers, concept artists, and others in the credits. (Deltarune, even more so.) Stardew Valley’s Eric Barone? ConcernedApe is a whole team now, with QA, platform support, translation, specific update contributors, and so on.
At the same time, right at the start of these credits, archived by Moby Games, you may see listings like, “Undertale, by Toby Fox.” Similarly, an old Balatro AMA reads: “I am localthunk, the developer and artist for Balatro, and today I’m joined by my publisher Playstack.”
This is absolutely not me calling Localthunk a liar or a hypocrite. (The framing for this AMA may well have been written by Playstack, for one.) And again, we – I – have said “Balatro creator.” And I think there are reasonable ways to talk about the defining creators of games without losing sight of the bigger production. Eric Barone made Stardew Valley. This is not an unreasonable thing to say. (He said it!) If I asked you who made Stardew Valley, it would be unreasonable to answer in any other way.
One problem is that people don’t seem to agree on what “creator” means. The origin and evolution of a game is sometimes attributed to one person. XCOM’s Julian Gollop, Death Stranding’s Hideo Kojima, Dragon Age’s David Gaider, even Demon’s Souls’ Hidetaka Miyazaki. Some devs specifically want to be called the creator of something; Dead Space’s Glen Schofield comes to mind.
The solution to this, increasingly, is to be more specific about who came up with, pitched, shepherded, and worked on a game. Game dev is a pretty broad title, and more obvious disciplines like art and programming, the sort of conventional design stuff that people like to use to portray game development in horribly cringe movies and TV shows, is only part of it. Much the same goes for this team size discourse.
It can feel like semantics, but the fact is almost nobody in the games industry is actually an island – and I’ve personally spoken to a ton of all-but-solo developers in my career. One of them is Joakim Sandberg, who made Iconoclasts. (The credits say: “Game by Joakim Sandberg.”) Sandberg comes to mind now because, as part of my recent developer roundtable on what people get wrong about games, he disputed the idea that “one person, like the director, is responsible for every popular aspect of a game. Video games have many directors … A game is its team, not its auteur.”
It’s important to distinguish between who the core, lead creatives and developers on a project may be – that’d be your in-house staff like Expedition 33’s Sandfall – and who all actually pitched in to get that project shipped. And I can see where this discourse has come from. If you don’t read the dang credits, and most people don’t, it’s easy to miss. My counterpoint is that, as a general rule, it’s also easy to assume: yeah, it was probably a lot more people than it may seem.
At its launch, there was a similar back-and-forth over how many people made Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and there are absolutely holes to be poked in the idea that it was under three dozen people. That might be the Sandfall team, but loads of other folks contributed to the game’s release and success. This is the case with nearly every project.
What seems to have changed now, as some developers have worried, is how these roles and nuances are presented. The glorification, or borderline weaponization, of the reputation of a small team, as if their smallness is some dramatic challenge for them to overcome in the face of the AAA villain. There’s a world of difference between lead and alone, and in that world, you’ll find essential credits owed to countless external, contracted, third-party, or otherwise supporting developers. And louder than ever, this was overlooked on the Summer Game Fest stage.
“I feel like we’re entering the age of ‘we’re not like those OTHER studios’ pick me marketing and I’m a bit worried about it,” said The Coalition technical narrative designer Jarret Poole.
“It’s incredibly noticeable how often ‘and an army of outsourcers outside America and Western Europe’ is left out of these team sizes,” says Mike Bithell. “That’s the part I find real uncomfortable.”
Bithell adds: “I think it’s absolutely cool to talk simply about team size as ‘number of people my company directly employs’.. It’s when that becomes a key marketing point I get uncomfortable.”
