adminAAA game development is facing questions about rising costs, large teams and creative risk. Alexandre Amancio, a former creative director on Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and Assassin’s Creed: Unity, argues that the answer is not simply to add more staff. He points instead to leaner teams, clearer project boundaries and production methods suited to each game.
Why AAA game development needs a different approach
At DevGAMM Lisbon in November, Amancio presented a talk titled “From AAA to Ashes: Why the Future Belongs to the Bold.” He discussed the effects of studio expansion and risk-averse decision-making, including layoffs, creative stagnation and a growing distance between developers and their work.
Amancio is currently senior vice-president of world-building and IP strategy at FunPlus. His experience on large productions gives him a perspective on the practical challenges of coordinating hundreds of people. He describes game-making as a “wicked problem”: many inputs affect the result, and the process varies enough that it is difficult to identify one universally optimal method after a game is finished.
Because games range from mobile card titles to expansive open worlds, production solutions should reflect a project’s scale and design. A useful starting point is to identify where complexity can be reduced and establish clear decision-making stages. Teams can then review work methodically instead of allowing every part of production to move in a different direction.
Smaller teams and project-specific support
Amancio questions whether enormous permanent teams are necessary or sustainable. Once a group grows beyond roughly a hundred people, coordination can become more demanding: managers may need additional staff to coordinate other managers. Adding people to a difficult task can also disrupt those already making progress.
He sees potential in a lean core team supported by temporary crews, co-development partners or outsourcing when a project needs particular skills. This resembles a model used in film production, where a central group can bring together a crew for a specific project. The practical lesson is to match staffing to the work rather than keep every specialty in one oversized team throughout development.
“The gaming industry has treated itself as being part of the software industry, but it is kind of a weird hybrid.”
Games differ from films because their design often develops during production. A feature or system may change as the team discovers what makes the experience enjoyable. Amancio compares a large studio to a train whose different sections are trying to move at different speeds. A smaller core, with teams joining or leaving at appropriate stages, may be easier to manage.
Practical takeaway: Give external partners a clearly defined task and explain how it connects to the main game. Once the limits and goals are understood, the partner can have room to solve the problem creatively.
Make pre-production prove the game’s core
Before a project moves into full production, the team should have a working prototype that demonstrates the central idea. For many games, a vertical slice—a representative section built to show the intended experience—can help validate the direction. However, simply reproducing that section across a larger game does not guarantee that the complete experience will work.
Teams also need to assess how the game feels from beginning to end. This is especially important for systemic games, where multiple interacting mechanics create the experience. A convincing test may require several key systems to work together, rather than a polished sample of one isolated part.
For Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Amancio recalls that the team considered two directions: a more traditional story following one protagonist through the French Revolution, and a co-operative experience that gave players their own paths through the period. The team chose the option audiences would recognize most readily. In retrospect, he remains interested in the alternative, more personal approach.
He also values systemic design: simple mechanics that combine to create unexpected outcomes. The bomb system in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, for example, gave players tools to influence crowds by attracting or dispersing them. Such mechanics can give players more agency, but they also add development demands. Unity was being built alongside a new engine and integrated multiplayer, factors that contributed to the project’s complexity.
Use creative pillars to control feature creep
New ideas do not have to be rejected automatically, but they should be tested against the project’s defining principles. Amancio identifies assassination, social stealth and parkour as core pillars of the Assassin’s Creed series. A proposed feature that connects with several pillars is more likely to strengthen the game; one that sits far outside them may be a poor fit.
Explaining this logic to the whole team can make idea reviews more constructive. Developers can assess proposals against the project’s goals before passing them forward. Decisions can then account for likely impact, development time and risk instead of relying on an unexplained yes or no.
Constraints can also support creativity. Financial, technical or design limits may push a team beyond its first, most obvious solution. Clear boundaries are particularly useful when a project involves many contributors: they help people make decisions that reinforce the same experience.
Reuse can save time, but expectations matter
Reusing locations and systems can make follow-up games faster to develop, provided the result still feels worthwhile to players. A shared city with established traffic and crowd systems could support different kinds of games, but repeating content without meaningful changes may appear to audiences as repackaging.
Amancio suggests that studios should be candid about what a new release offers. He imagines returning to Paris in Assassin’s Creed: Unity for a different experience shaped around each player’s path through the French Revolution. Reusing a strong setting could leave more room to develop new ideas, while honest communication helps audiences understand the purpose of the reuse.
The Yakuza/Like a Dragon series offers an example of familiar locations becoming part of a series’ appeal, including the fictional district of Kamurocho.
Image credit: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio/Sega
For studios, the broader lesson is to decide deliberately what should be built anew and what can be carried forward. Reuse is most effective when it supports a distinct game rather than serving as a substitute for one.
What better AAA game development could look like
Amancio’s ideas point toward production built around focused core teams, well-defined partnerships and prototypes that test a game’s central experience. Creative ideas still matter, but they need shared principles and practical limits so that teams can judge which features belong.
There is no single process that fits every genre or production scale. Better AAA game development depends on matching team size, collaboration and testing methods to the specific project—and giving developers a clear direction before production expands.
Image credit: Ubisoft
