《Anthem》执行制片人表示 CD Projekt 处于“非常危险的境地”，并指出制作该规模和质量的游戏成本不断膨胀

Mark Darrah predicts a "bifurcation" is coming

"The triple-A industry has become over-specialised, specialised to the point of hyper-fragility," Mark Darrah states in a foreboding interview found deep in the pages of the Summer Eternal Anthology, recently covered by Edwin. As a former executive producer at Bioware, who corralled teams on Anthem and Dragon Age, after starting his career as a programmer on Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire, Darrah has seen firsthand the growing scale of video game production and the challenges it can bring.

Darrah's also been vocal about the difficult development of Anthem in the past, and the struggles he had at Bioware. However, while what he says in the interview may be familiar, I found it gained sharper definition when read in light of games industry news and some of the interviews I've had with developers this year. So let me pull together some of the choice bits with the extra context from our own RPS vaults.

I should say, I've not laid hands myself on the Summer Eternal Anthology - a 500-page manifesto/design document/making-of book for Red Rooster, the new RPG from a splinter group of former Disco Elysium developers. But Edwin, who acknowledges that he's acknowledged in the acknowledgements section, did send me some photos of the interview with Darrah that's found deep within its pages.

Anyway, back to the Darrah's warning of over-specialisation. One of the problems, he says, is that it's caused teams to balloon in size because "No one person can add anything into a triple-A game. It requires at least five people." Obviously, the immediate implication of this is that larger teams cost more to run. The more staff you have on payroll, the more you will need to pay out each month on salaries, the more office space you will need to rent, the more software licenses and equipment you will need to pay for. This isn't the first time this has been said, just last month I ran an interview with Saber Interactive's chief creative officer Tim Willits, who put some numbers on those costs. "Each one of those developers is expensive," Willits said. "You have 200 people that you're paying $15,000 per person per month, which gets you way over two million."

But Darrah then links the complexity of projects to the increased risk of a delay. "The reality is that the bigger your team, the more vulnerable you typically are to disruption in terms of time," Darrah says. "If you have a 500-person team and you go one month late, that's probably adding five, ten million to your budget right there. It doesn't take much. And it's very easy for a 500-person team to go one month late, just because of the sand in the gears of the machine."

To put that in another context, consider Grand Theft Auto VI. As Jason Schreier detailed in his Making Of feature for Bloomberg, where Rockstar's head of publishing Jennifer Kolbe had to go to Take-Two Chief Executive Officer Strauss Zelnick and tell him they needed to delay their mega game from a 2025 release until May 2026 and then go back to him a few months later to say it had to be delayed until November. "I think he said, 'You’re kidding. Please tell me you're kidding,'" she said. Now, bear in mind that there aren't 500 people working GTA 6, there are more than 4,700. Using Darrah and Willit's back of the napkin maths, that delay may have cost Rockstar more than $500m.

Darrah speculates that the growing complexity may also be encouraging larger studios to stay in the prototyping phase because "prototyping is the one place where the devs are still allowed to be creative, so they don't want to leave that phase because they don't want to get down to just executing lists." Though, as Willits told me, having a fully-staffed team working on a prototype is terrible news for a studio's bottom line – "you do not need 200 people before you have a vertical slice, you're burning money."

Even if a game does come out at the end of that long, expensive production, it now has to earn back significantly more to break even. But, more and more, we're seeing executives get scared of the mounting costs of an in-development game and cutting bait while it's still in the pre-production phase. Just look at Perfect Dark and Everwild.

Darrah touches on the risk of that long, hard-to-leave-behind prototyping phase, because while you want developers to add things to the game "you don't want them to be able to generate work for other people. And as people have gotten more specialised, the ability for people to add things to the game that doesn't generate work for other people is basically vanishingly small."

Threaded through the interview with Darrah is his prediction that the games industry is headed toward a "bifurcation", in which several games will tear away from the rest of the market and become an unreachable target for other publishers, forcing them to scale their expectations down. "GTA 6 is going to rip itself off and take five or six games with it, up into the upper echelon of 'we can spend any amount of money on our games and it's going to be all right,'" Darrah says. Along with Rockstar's crime 'em up, he suggests Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, and Battlefield could join it. He says there are just too many games that have $100m budgets that aren't making that money back.

Darrah points to his old studio Bioware as an example of one of the victims of this split. "BioWare sat right at the point where it doesn't quite work." Shortly after Dragon Age: Veilguard's launch, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said the RPG had significantly underperformed, reaching only 1.5m players, less than the 3m the company had planned for. (Also, worth noting, that's not 1.5m sales, as the game had a free trial available and was available through EA's subscription service.)

As much as this may sound like something out of Bioshock, with all of the top-selling games breaking away and making a home under the sea where they just eat all of the money for the rest of time, Darrah paints a surprisingly optimistic picture. "If that is happening, then I think you're going to see a lot more studios the size of Sandfall Interactive's Expedition 33. These are teams that are pretty small, pretty focused – Clair Obscur was very small with unusually massive outsourcing – a roughly 40-person team."

As Nic (RPS in peace) explained in the past, the claim that Clair Obscur was made by 30 people hides the sheer number of people involved in its production. Darrah explains that the difference between Sandfall and so many other teams in the industry is that typically a studio has a representative of all the disciplines it needs in-house – designers, artists, programmers, testers, audio people – and outsourcing is used to expand the capacity of the team, providing artists to work with the art director, for instance. But, Darrah says, Sandfall is different. "It looks to me like what Sandfall did was to keep entire holes in their structure – they don't appear to have any internal animators at all, and they outsourced 100% of their animation." The nature of the game, a turn-based RPG, helps with that, but even then that's a case of the developer recognising a significant way to reduce the team's overhead.

(Another example of a studio seemingly outsourcing smartly to keep their headcount low, look at what Neon Giant's achieving with immersive sim No Law.)

I will also point out that, while outsourcing can reduce costs for a studio, for the recipients of the work it can mean low wages and a figurative straitjacket. South American developers told James earlier this year how, despite their evident expertise, it was still difficult to convince publishers they were perfectly capable to leading projects. All to often, they are only contracted to assist American studios on theirs.

If that great schism happens, with publishers giving up their dreams of making the next GTA or the next Call of Duty, it could, Darrah says, reshape the industry. "If that all goes away, then you'll get a bunch of room to make it work with titles that need to sell 3-4 million units," he says. "That's much more attractive. I don't want to be working on something like GTA, where if this thing doesn't sell 50 million units, it's going to lose money. That's insane."

Though, within this prediction there is something a smidge worrying: the future of CD Projekt. Darrah says the Witcher maker has entered that rarefied space of the mega game – "Their games now need to sell 15, 20 million units to make money." And with that capacity for success but also that necessity for success, well, Darrah says, "that's a really dangerous place to be."

Darrah doesn't offer any predictions for The Witcher 4 or Cyberpunk 2's prospects, but I can't help but think of the news in May that there are already twice as many people working on The Witcher 4 than the 240 who worked on The Witcher 3.

As I say, none of what Darrah is saying is new exactly, but when you look at what's been taking place in the last year, it does sound like a move away from the mega budgets of the early 2020s has to be on the cards for all but the very biggest studios, right?