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persnickety

> Back in the NES days, video games were small enough to be developed by absolutely tiny teams.

Ahem Stardew Valley. Wordle. Almost anything on itch.io. Heck, NES is still getting new games:

https://limitedrungames.com/collections/witch-n-wiiz

I think a better point of comparison is how much time it takes to create a game that receives acclaim now versus then.

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Time is generally represented in person-hours, which correlate well to team size necessary to get a product out the door. Most individuals or tiny teams can't afford to spend multiple years working on something alone.

Yet a lot of very popular games have been made by individuals or very small teams. Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Terraria, Hollow Knight, Braid, Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, Papers Please. I think you're right that the majority of games are made by larger teams, but there certainly seems to be something to the focus in vision enabled by smaller teams.

Stardew Valley was a guy living in his parents house for four and a half years working full time.

Googling says ConcernedApe spent about 10 hours a day, for 4.5 years, and let’s say he took a day off here and there, you’re looking at 10,000-15,000 man hours to deliver Stardew Valley.

So that’d be around $500,000-1,000,000 (likely higher) if you had a team working on it, paying them all $100,000 a year, to get that many hours out of them.

Making things on a team definitely makes things a lot more expensive!

I think they're arguing that those tend to take their creators more time. I recall that a couple decades ago small teams could publish games in very short time frames, but I could be wrong.

There's also Cave Story, which came out in 2004. I find it really impressive that the creator made the art, music, music editor, sound effect editor, music format, game engine, and stage editor, with only C++ and the Win32 interface, all while keeping a full time job (although he deliberately picked a low-key job at a printer company so he could work on Cave Story in his free time more). And halfway through, he got married and had kids, which slowed development.

> got married and had kids, which slowed development

Story of my life!

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