Former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who worked on the Left 4 Dead series, recently spoke out about game development team sizes, stating bluntly that games aren’t something that should be handed to “10,000-person teams.” He believes that massive teams bring more communication and decision-making problems, and that more people doesn’t mean games will be finished faster or be better.
Would 450 People Really Be Better?
Faliszek used his experience developing Left 4 Dead 2 as an example — the team at the time was only around 45 people. He believes that if they’d scaled up to 450 people back then, the game wouldn’t necessarily have been better. Instead, once a team expands, what really slows down development isn’t just production time — it’s the internal overhead of “not knowing what to do, repeatedly overturning decisions, and starting over.”
But Games Like GTA 6 Really Might Need a Huge Team!
However, Faliszek didn’t say large teams have no value at all. He believes that massive projects on the scale of billions of dollars like Grand Theft Auto VI are genuine exceptions and may really need large teams from different fields to pull off. The problem is, if every AAA game starts chasing the same ultra-large scale and visual fidelity, teams will naturally keep growing, and development costs will balloon alongside them.
What Really Eats Time Is “Everyone Not Knowing What to Do”
Faliszek believes one of the biggest time-wasting problems in the industry today is actually “indecision” and “backtracking” — unclear decision-making and making changes halfway through. He also thinks teams should maintain close enough collaboration so that people making decisions can communicate with each other, rather than having everyone get lost in layers of messages and meetings after the team explodes in size. At the end of the day, game development isn’t a company headcount — more people doesn’t automatically mean a better product.