Triple-A development in significant decline, EA claims

The number of studios working on triple-A games is at its lowest point for over a decade, EA’s chief creative director Richard Hilleman has claimed.

What is true today is that there are fewer triple-A games being built than at the same point in the previous generation,” he says in a recently published DICE Europe whitepaper.

I’ve done some calculations that say there were about 125 teams in the industry worldwide working on what I’d call a triple-A game on a console, and that was seven or eight years ago.

That number today is well south of 30; probably in the 25 range. What’s interesting is that, if you look at the composition of those teams, the numbers are exactly the same: those 125 teams became 25; the size of the teams increased by a factor of four.

This has everything to do with the standard definition to HD change. If you look at the math, that change is about content – richly about content – and as we evolved, our costs went substantially up. And the number of people on teams with that kind of vision went up by necessity.

I don’t see that kind of content-oriented change coming in this next generation of platforms. As a result, I think we were on a path that made me nervous, but it seems to have stabilized.”