summary
- Every game doesn’t have to be a long, open world epic to provide a fulfilling experience.
- The director of “Astro Bot” highlights the benefits of creating small games for higher quality.
- “Astro Bot” has been developing less and has convinced Sony to release a family-friendly game.
Most games these days are looking for epic adventures in a vast, open world, but not all games need to be that way. Sometimes people want a game that can finish for more than a few days. It doesn’t have to be a 75 hour action RPG to provide a deep experience.
Suitable case: Ast Robot. Team Asobi’s platformer may not be an open world game with countless abilities of trees and other things, but even without them it’s still a fun time. Game director Nicholas Dessett believes this and believes not every game needs to be the next big thing.
“It’s okay to make a small game,” the Astorobot director insists.
Nicholas Deuset, who spoke at GDC 2025 (via game developers), gave a “Making Astro Bot” talk full of participants. In it, Doucet said, “It’s okay to make a small game.” He also presented people with photos from Team Asobi’s onboarding handbook, which states, “We aim for quality, not quantity.”
Doucet means that small thoughts mean that you have more control over your work and the processes behind it. Also, in short/small games, it means that players are more likely to actually finish it.
“The outlook for a game that can actually be completed is a really positive argument (for small games),” explains Doucet. “That meant that it was okay to have a 12-hour game, but if it was eight hours, it would have been calm to reach a consistent quality.”
Compared to most large budget AAA titles, the Astro Bot was developed in just three and a half years and over six months of development than the team originally planned. Team Asobi maintained it by adjusting the pitch of the studio’s ramp-up curve to accommodate fewer developers over a longer period of time, making it unbeatable.
Whatever Asobi did, he worked. The platformer not only won the prestigious Game of the Year award at the Game Awards last year, but also convinced Sony’s president that he should release a family-friendly game.
Even though Astro Bot’s graphics were simplified compared to God of War, Horizon Franchise and other AAA first-party titles, one of the developers of Team Asobi said the game “pushes the PS5’s processing power to the limit.”
With today’s fast-growing game development costs and the fact that many “old” people playing the game are responsible and can’t dedicate two weeks (or more) to one game, I think it brings to a small game! Hopefully, many game studios will notice the success of Astro Bot and use it as a motive that not all games need to be open world action RPG blockbusters.
