How Many Developers Are There For a FPS?

[stpfarms]

I know this has been beaten to death with the 18 people on the DNF team, and this has nothing to do with whether DNF ever sees the light of day. I will play it when it is released, and will simply be bored with whats out there now until it arrives.

But I was wondering if anyone knows how many people are on other development teams in the industry.

ie: Epic's team which has pumped out TONS of Unreal games in the last several years.
ID's Quake 4, Doom 3
Crytech's Farcry
Valve's Half Life, Half Life 2
Bungee's Halo, Halo2, Halo3

Just wondering how many people work on any in particular game. Speaking of games... Crytech's new engine coming out looks incredible!

[Kristian Joensen]

id is 29 developers + 3 administrative staff(22 developers are credited for Doom 3). Epic I believe is 60~65ish people spread over three teams(UT2K7, GOW, UE3).

[FireFly]

According to Cliffy they have "about 75 people on staff". However on GoW they have "between 25 and 30 people" actively working on the game.

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=6602108192661560420&

Valve now have about a hundred employees spread between all their different projects (Episodes 2 & 3, Portal, Team Fortress 2, DoD:S, CS:S, Steam). I think they had around 50 employees working on Half-Life 2. Crytek has 115 employees according to Wikipedia.

So it depends on the developer but 50 - 100 employees is fairly typical. I know EA uses teams of 100+ employees.

[Kristian Joensen]

Yes 50-100 is fairly typical for entire companies that have multiple teams and for individual development teams that release on a yearly basis at EA and other major publishers

As for AAA WID independent developers the standard seems to be 25-30ish developers/per team potentially with some help from members of potential other inhouse teams in those cases where there is more tahn one inhouse team

AFAIK those are basicaly the two models out there. Ofcourse there are variants and exceptions to that. Aswell as so called garage developers.

[Joe Siegler]

I know this has been beaten to death with the 18 people on the DNF team, and this has nothing to do with whether DNF ever sees the light of day. I will play it when it is released, and will simply be bored with whats out there now until it arrives.

But I was wondering if anyone knows how many people are on other development teams in the industry.

ie: Epic's team which has pumped out TONS of Unreal games in the last several years.
ID's Quake 4, Doom 3
Crytech's Farcry
Valve's Half Life, Half Life 2
Bungee's Halo, Halo2, Halo3

Just wondering how many people work on any in particular game. Speaking of games...

There is no global across the board answer to that. The industry doesn't work that way.

[Zixinus]

Depends, core teams that don't include voice actors can be quite high, exspecially including the fact that you have to do far more stuff in higher quality then before. Meaning that they need more staff members to do stuff.

[Damien_Azreal]

Varies from developer to developer. There is no set number of people, just as Joe said.

Hell, Monolith was plit into four seperate teams while they were working on FEAR, Condemned and Matrix Online at the same time.
They have still yet to release any info on that fourth project. :p

[Destroyer]

I would think alot. GAmes are getting pretty complex you need experts in just about everything.

[The Deadsider]

Now a days development teams are split up as so: 1 or 2 guys on level design. 1 guy on models. 128 people on graphics.

[Wamplet]

S2games has a handful of people, like 5, i am guessing.

[DavoX]

Now a days development teams are split up as so: 1 or 2 guys on level design. 1 guy on models. 128 people on graphics.
0 on gameplay? :p

[Damien_Azreal]

In some games... yes.

[Buzzer]

How many developers does it take to make an FPS?

One to screw in the...

Answers may vary ;)

[avatar_58]

I personally think developing games has become too big and crowded these days. There used to be a time when a small team of less than a dozen could make a classic. These days too many games are visionless and hardly groundbreaking due to so many different people having creative control.

I can understand grunt work on models and such, but the main aspects of the game should be handled by only a few people to make sure it comes out a AAA title and not some generic turd.

What happened to the days where we could easily tell when a game was heavily designed by a certain developer? I like being able to say "This is Schafer's style" instead of "Oh...another id game". It is especially bad with FPS games lately, although even RPGs like Oblivion reak of too many cooks spoiling the pot. Its really a shame.

[NetNessie]

3 developers did Darwinia and Uplink and both those games where as unique as they where awesome.

[Phait]

It's just sad that all Epic knows for the past how many years is Unreal. C'mon, move on!

[Laser Eyes]

There's a simple way of finding out how many developers worked on a game. Just read the credits in the game manual.

[Kev_Boy]

3 developers did Darwinia and Uplink and both those games where as unique as they where awesome.

Perhaps to you, but not for me.

[Zixinus]

The gaming community is spillint up IMO. Like in films, there were horror movie fans, action movie fans, romance fans, comdedy fans, etc.

The problem lies more in the fact that publishers, if not developers, think that the gaming community is still united and one.

EDIT: The typical thing is that there will be gamers that are convervative and would rathet stick to older games, while others are hungering for anything new.

[Babe]

Any idea how many people worked on Prey ? And how many people is working on Duke Nukem Forever ?

[Kristian Joensen]

There are 29 people(+ GB and SM ofcourse) credited for the development of Prey. At one point(late last year) there where 28 people on the DNF team. The current number I don't know.

[FireFly]

We can't know the current number because of the departures. But:

"Our sources indicate that while the game's team has reached a size of about 24-28 developers, recently it has been closer to 18, meaning these current departures may actually comprise a majority of the team."

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/43655

[Kristian Joensen]

Yeah but you also have to take into account them hiring people so really we don't know.

Anyway it appear that there where around 37 people on the FEAR team.