Discover why Clair Obscur Expedition 33 is outperforming AAA games! A game developer explains why smaller indie studios without bloat can do well in the industry. See why Geeks and gamers prefer a game from Sandfall Interactive rather than AC Shadows.
Notes
• Why Expedition 33’s success proves small teams can outperform AAA
• Sandfall Interactive made the game with just 33 devs in 5 years
• It hit 1 million sales in only 3 days
• AAA studios keep delivering mediocre games despite massive teams
• Agile development works best with small, cross-discipline teams
• Explained how Agile and Scrum workflows function in game dev
• Why more developers = more meetings, more delays, and higher budgets
• The dangers of feature creep and bloated pipelines
• How smaller teams build stronger synergy and better working relationships
• Other successful small-team games like Valheim, Hades, Hellblade, and Black Myth Wukong
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⏰ Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction
00:33 – Clair Obscur Expedition 33’s Success
01:47 – Agile Development
03:20 – Scrum
06:23 – Trade-offs to having larger size
07:33 – Other Smaller Successes
07:53 – Team Synergy
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#gaming #expedition33 #clairobscurexpedition33
Expedition 33 has released it’s doing great and
people are loving it I’m going to explain to you why smaller development teams are better when
it comes to game development salaam my name is Mustafa I am a professional game developer I
have worked in the game industry at Treyarch I’ve also worked at Zwift on their indoor cycling
game currently I have a narrative driven tower defense game on Steam called Nexus Defenders and
I have a first person stealth horror game that’s in the works coming soon you can find the links to
both of the games below in the description these recent years we’ve been seeing so many mediocre
games come out from the AAA industry from Ubisoft EA Sony Activision Microsoft all of them have
been releasing games that are at best mediocre but we’ve been seeing huge hits coming out of the
double A industry as well as the indie industry Clair Obscure Expedition 33 developed by Sandfall
Interactive which is an indie studio in France they developed this game with 33 developers it
took them 5 years of development keep in mind typical game development cycle takes around 3 to
5 years on average in rare cases it will take much longer for example Cyberpunk 2077 took about 8
years to develop and within 3 days of the release of Expedition 33 they already hit 1 million sales
they didn’t use misleading language by saying 1 million players they said 1 million sales after 3
days more importantly it is impressing people the graphics are impressive people are saying they’re
loving the story the gameplay is good it is a fantastic game I’m seeing lots of people praise
the game and I’m not really seeing people share that they’re playing the game and disliking it
so let me explain to you why smaller development teams are better when it comes to video game
and software development first of all the work methodology that’s typically used within software
development and video game development is called agile to explain agile first of all you have your
employees of different disciplines for example you have your programmers your artists your designers
QA producers and managers rather than having all the programmers work together all the artists work
together all the QA work together what agile does is it breaks those disciplines into different
teams and these teams own a different feature or a system for example you’d have a team working
on the combat system movement system narrative inventory enemy AI etc etc for example let’s say
you have 20 programmers you take two of those programmers and you have them work on the combat
system then you take one or two of the QA people and you have them also work on the combat system
take one game designer and you have them work on the combat system and of course the combat system
needs some effects as well so you have one or two uh artists work on that combat system as well
so then you have a team of about 10 people or so working together on that combat system that’s
generally how agile works you take different members from the different disciplines you bring
them together and they all work on a small portion of the game or a small portion of the project now
within agile there’s a methodology called scrum scrum is basically when you set up specific
milestones within certain increments such as one or two weeks long and these two weeks are called a
sprint and then the management decides we want to hit these objectives within the next two weeks so
to set this up you have a sprint grooming meeting the sprint grooming meeting is when that team
comes together and they look through all the tickets on the system the tickets are all an
objective that needs to be done and then they decide which ones are of priority after the sprint
grooming meeting there’s another meeting called sprint planning this is after you look at the
prioritized tickets and decide which ones we’re going to do in this upcoming sprint these next
two weeks and then you distribute them to the different developers and have them work on those
tickets on top of that you have a daily stand-up meeting the daily stand-up meeting generally
is about 15 minutes long everybody on the team gets together and quickly explains what they did
yesterday what they’re doing today any blockers that they have blockers being issues that are
preventing them from finishing their tasks and then anything else that’s worth mentioning keep
in mind 15 minutes goes by very fast when every single person on a team needs to report what they
did if you have 10 people on a team and you have 15 minutes everybody can’t take two minutes
long explaining what’s going on because then you’ll go over when you go over in a meeting that
might affect the next meeting that people might need to go to and that messes with the schedule of
everybody then after the sprint is over there’s a sprint review meeting the sprint review meeting is
basically covering what got accomplished and then after the sprint review meeting there’s another
meeting called the sprint retrospective the team gets together and provides feedback to each other
on what went wrong and what they could have done to improve and aside from those meetings
there are all sorts of other meetings that the different disciplines might need to go to for
example engineers might need a tech sync meeting where they go over code dependencies architecture
changes or integration plans they might have a feature review meeting and then there’s one-on-one
code reviews artists have asset reviews in which the leads or director provides feedback on the art
assets beyond that there are more meetings such as one-on- ones which is usually a supervisor with
a subordinate there’s also an all hands meeting which is the entire studio getting together
there’s also cross team communication because each feature and system does not exist in a vacuum
there are dependencies between the features and systems so the different teams need to communicate
with each other let’s look at the trade-offs once the teams start getting too big more teams mean
more meetings you need more meetings for the cross team communication bigger teams mean longer
meetings if you have 20 people in a daily standup then everybody has less than a minute to get their
message out then you’d have to increase the time of the daily standup same for all the other
meetings I listed off you’d have to make them longer plus this leads to slow decision making
once you have so many teams and so much cross team communication in addition you have feature creep
because you have so many teams and the different teams might run out of work so they need more
work so you come up with more features and more systems for them to work on while the other teams
are working on what they’re working on and the biggest downside is the budget the most expensive
part of game development is paying everybody’s salary when you literally have thousands of people
working on a game that’s thousands of salaries to pay even if you’re including outsourced work
the outsourcing costs money too this is why there are more and more smaller studios that
are doing really well for themselves not just Expedition 33 but we have other games like Black
Myth Wukong Valheim Hades 1 and 2 even the first Hellblade did really well and they’re not just the
exception that it’s becoming more and more common while on the other hand these larger studios are
just churning out more and more mediocre games and aside from all those downsides I mentioned
earlier when you have a smaller team of people you build stronger synergy the professional
relationships between the developers becomes more valuable due to the fact that they have a
small tight team rather than hundreds of people and hundreds of faces that they only see every
once in a while let me know in the comments below if you can think of any other successful game
that was developed by a smaller studio anyways thanks for watching again my name’s been Mustafa
please hit the like and subscribe take care salaam
4 Comments
Are you playing Clair Obscur Expedition 33? Let me know if it's comparable to AAA titles of recent years!
So… when will developers have time outside the meeting to do their works…?
Have you been hitting the gym mate?
I haven't played it yet, but everyone says it's a lot of fun!