Left 4 Dead writer and Valve veteran Chet Faliszek doubts the company would really benefit from going on a hiring spree. His 12 years at Valve taught him that great, timely games aren’t made by giant teams.
“I just think games aren’t made to be made by 10,000-person teams. These giant teams just don’t work,” Faliszek says in a new YouTube video responding to the question, “Why doesn’t valve hire more people?” The developer acknowledges that certain two billion-dollar exercises like GTA 6 may require “a gajillion” different hands to hold it, but a monster-sized Rockstar sensation is the exception to a reasonable rule.
Faliszek recalls a Ubisoft artist telling him how the Assassin’s Creed publisher only hires “top artists,” which apparently tallied to about 3,500 people. Valve suffered from similar laughable bloat when it came to its focus on graphics and fidelity – something that isn’t inherently wrong at all, but “requires these giant teams,” says Faliszek. “I just don’t think you get a lot of bang for your buck.”
Even worse than their being expensive, overly huge development teams are time-wasters. “Really, the reason why games take so long is indecision, backtracking,” Faliszek says. “Problems like that are the things that really eat up time more than just production.”
It’s rare that even the most egregious game delays come from nonstop production, after all; it took Dead Island 2 nearly a decade to launch after playing hot potato with three different studios, while Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 came out 21 years after the original game, and passing between two developers. It sounds like the worst game of telephone.
Faliszek apparently thinks equally poorly of remote work, describing it as, “You have this whisper network going.” Eventually, he expects that, “Ego comes in, because then, all of a sudden, you’re not being heard. You’re not being listened to. You’re having to be downwind of a bunch of decisions.”
“We made Left 4 Dead 2 with 45 people. I don’t think it would have been a better game if we would have made it with 450 people,” Faliszek says. “I think some of what we chase now in the game industry as our goals make us create these bigger teams. […] But I think you need to have some oomph there. You need to have some weight to what you’re releasing. But when that works best is when it’s made with people who are in the same room.” Or at least the same Google Meet.