Hideo Kojima Says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Small Team Size is 'Ideal' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 17 June 2025 / 4,650 Views
Hideo Kojima spoke at a Q&A and discussed the increasing size of video game developers.
"When I first started, it was like a team of six," said Kojima (via Dexerto). "You could do everything yourself. Now, it’s expanded. You can’t really control each employee, so you delegate. But sometimes, the idea doesn’t really work out because it’s a bigger team."
He mentioned the success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and said its smaller team is "ideal" for the game development experience.
"They only have like 33 team members and a dog," he stated. "That’s my ideal when I create something with a team. reation has now become much bigger. It’s kind of a war between how efficient you could [be] with the small team, but you have to make it so grand."
Kojima said modern game development is more like a "factory" as teams are now in the hundreds of employees.
"Big companies, like 600, 1,000 people, they’re full of totally different teams," he stated. "Everyone’s concentrating on their work and then combining together."
His goal for Kojima Productions is to keep the team size "under 150 people" and "during the pandemic… It was over 200 people."
The next game from Hideo Kojima and Kojima Productions is Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, which is set to launch for the PlayStation 5 on June 26.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Small team and the hundreds of outsourced workers. Is he where Geoff got his recent fixation on small dev teams? "Solo dev and 9 of his freinds".
Having a small core dev team is still very significant. Highlighting the size of the team is not the same as saying a game was only developed by "30 people"
Smalls teams is why the best games of the NES and SNES era were so innovative.
That is quite small.
Live Ops games, even on mobile, can have teams as high as 150 across multiple locations. At least when it comes to the larger studios - basically you have the core devs, the server team, and then various update teams each with their own artists, scripters, QA, design/writing, a producer, a director, and engineers… there might be 3-4 of these teams, and that’s all under the department heads, product managers, executive producers, any licensing or marketing people.
Honestly, I'm surprised that a lot more gaming companies haven't gone harder into using contracted assets. I understand that it puts your timeline at the mercy of someone else but outsourcing has become the standard in many industries. Where I work, contractors do nearly everything that involves any real effort or skill. It's not only a massive reduction in direct overhead but also in related management costs. Of course, the contracted workers are usually the ones who get shafted on benefits and such but people really like the "small development team" calling card.
I think most of my favourite games were developed by core teams of less than 30 people, sometimes significantly less, so can't disagree with him.
The bigger the team, the bigger the coordination cost.
Think about it, the number of communication directions equals (n-1)*n/2
At such sizes (400, 600, 800, 1000+) the time spent updating people on decisions sky-rockets,
easily making up 1/3rd of the entire development time .
(for coordination tasks like meetings, reporting, and internal reviews.)
Large teams are inherently less efficient than smaller, focused subteams — by definition, due to communication scaling. The tl;dr is, better have 5 teams each 50 people develop a smaller game each, than 250 people develop a single big "AAA" game. Your costs and risk will be overall lower too.
