With the industry continuing to battle financial hardship, ‘Astro Bot’ head Nicolas Doucet has emphasised “it’s ok to make a small game” that is more manageable for studios rather than solely focus on AAA titles.
‘Astro Bot’ boss Nicolas Doucet has stressed “it’s ok to make a small game” while the industry struggles financially.
The industry has faced intense economic difficulties in the last couple of years, resulting in layoffs, studio closures and project cancellations, but Doucet – who headed up 2024 Game of the Year Award-winner ‘Astro Bot’ – has insisted companies don’t need to rely on AAA games, and instead should focus on projects that are easier to manage.
Speaking on a panel at Game Developers Conference 2025, the Team Asobi studio boss said: “From the start, we were in the mindset that it’s ok to make a compact game … it’s ok to make a small game.
“So for us, it means that we’re making something of such scale that we can control it fully. That’s from a development standpoint. But not only that.
“For the players, we all know that players today have a backlog of games and cannot complete their games, so the prospect of a game you can actually complete is a really persuasive argument.”
Doucet echoed comments from ‘Helldivers 2’ head creative director Johan Pilestedt, who warned there would be more “unnecessarily brutal” layoffs unless the industry branched out into new IPs and projects.
He explained: “The games industry is caught in a vicious circle of death and rebirth. Every so often we lay off thousands of people suddenly, and then nobody understands why, and I think it’s just because we converge.
“We will always go through the cycles of death and rebirth, but now that cycle is unnecessarily brutal because we don’t diversify enough. We need to make more types of games because people are playing more than ever and still we are unable to stay in business. It’s ridiculous.”
Astro Bot head insists ‘it’s ok to make a small game’ as industry battles financial woes
