The long term productivity of this dev team is insane. They need to write a book on how they sustain it, and sell it to every single AAA studio.
Hello games has ~40 employees, apparently up from ~20 years ago.
343 has over 500 employees... maybe 750? I am not sure. But they spent at least an order of magnitude more manhours on Halo Infinite (not even counting help from other Microsoft branches and carryover work from 3 previous Halo games), and just look at how Infinite ended up compared to NMS.
Seems like the game dev sweetspot is "AA" sized, like Hello Games, Coffee Stain, maybe Obsidian... its where economies of scale really kick in, but beyond that studios quickly hit all sorts of scaling issues.
Anyway, a big part of the efficiency issues with AAA studios is they generally get fully or close to fully underway on a design that mostly goes into the trash before launch. So they aren't really developing one game, they're developing several with varying amounts of overlap and completeness. The development of Doom Eternal is a high-profile (and very successful) example of this.
This is also why the industry is unfortunately fueled on crunch: sure it took 4+ years to deliver the final product but much of the final game shaped up in the last 6-12 months. It's a miracle more games don't need year+ delays.
From what I've seen, indie studios tend to spend a much larger percentage of the development cycle prototyping and iterating before going into full production. They do this because they can (less overhead from idle staff) and because have to (they can't afford to spend years spinning their wheels). It's much more efficient but it also limits scope (which has some big downsides).
I think many "AA" studios and larger indies are getting around this conundrum with early access. They commit to a working skeleton but still get to prototype features, they get a revenue stream from their own testers to sustain them, and they get a "free" relaunch from a full launch on their own time.
It’s a stereotype that game developers don’t usually write good code. I’m not sure how accurate this really is, but I bet a lot of games get released and then the devs are like “nope, not touching that again” (except for easy bugfixes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ
it goes over this entire saga from failure at launch to massive success
Also, for videos on video-games, he has another, "secret" channel, most don't know about: https://www.youtube.com/@IHstorymode/videos
I felt like it did seem rather overblown, i don’t do multiplayer so that wasn’t an issue and from playing elite i was pretty used to rather sparse universes, really like the aesthetic of it and not having read any of the press had no idea i what i was supposed to be expecting.
Which makes me wonder if Apple's been funding development, perhaps for some time.
Great news for the dozens of Mac gamers. If Apple's headset is a success(?) and games want to support their headset, adding Mac support will be very easy to justify.
From what I hear, from someone who knows someone who works at Hello Games, is that they've hired people to work on "the next game project", but NMS keeps selling, so they keep putting out big updates, because every time they do that, more people buy the game.
Your friend of a friend must be mistaken.
We've been assured hundreds of times over by experts on HN that putting out quality software will lead to bankruptcy.
The only correct way to success is to build a low-grade MVP, then charge a monthly subscription, then sell the user's personal data and "telemetry." Surely, there can't be another way?
Difference is the NMS team appears to have an offering people wanted versus Bear Clone #875 and web UI POC skewed to highlight some banal metric for $99/mo per team member #1,773,958
I really feel like we (HN) should be better than just parroting blogs and YouTubers and be better about actually talking about something in an informed manner instead.
This is the type of response I expect on steam or some other gaming site where people are incapable of making their own decisions and instead just parrot someone else.