The game industry has grown tremendously in the last 25 years and so have the budgets and team sizes that are required to build triple-A titles many consumers now expect. The advent of faster broadband Internet and connected consoles, however, has given many developers another avenue to pursue: smaller downloadable games for networks like Xbox Live, PlayStation Network or WiiWare.
Junction Point's Warren Spector is a veteran who started making games when team sizes were far, far smaller, and in some ways he'd very much like to get back to that. Although he has no current plans to make small downloadable games at the moment, he expressed his desire to do so in a recent in-depth interview with IndustryGamers.
"Do I have interest and desire, oh my gosh yes. I would love to do small stuff. I started out when teams were 4 people and teams of 10 people were a big thing and it’d be nice to do something really small and short," Spector reminisced in Part 2 of our interview.
"I told the guys at Disney the day I met them, when they made the offer, that I don’t do budgets, I don’t do schedules, I make the games I want to make. I develop like that, you don’t want that, we should part ways now so we stay friends. And I told them if you look at the last six games I’ve done, they’ve all taken between 32 and 36 months, and if I tell you I’m going a make a game in less than that, then I’m probably lying to you. So, I would love to do something small and short and downloadable, but I have no idea how to do it. But right now, that’s another one where no one’s actually working on anything."
Towards the end of 2009, Disney acquired Wideload Games, which has had a focus on smaller and more casual games, particularly with its Wideload Shorts group. Since Spector is under the same corporate Disney umbrella, perhaps he could coordinate with Wideload on some smaller projects?
