When Alexandre Amancio — the creative director behind Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Revelations — talks about the sausage-making of big-budget games, he doesn’t sugarcoat it. After a decade of studio bloat and risk-averse thinking, he argues, the Western AAA machine is creaking: mass layoffs, creative stagnation, and an industry that increasingly chases metrics over craft.
Amancio’s prescription is surprisingly simple: shrink the core, polish the constraints, and use outside teams smartly. It’s not nostalgia for smaller studios so much as a practical blueprint for making complexity manageable.
Why bigger often breaks things
There’s a tipping point, Amancio says, once a project grows past roughly a hundred people. Coordination overhead explodes, managerial layers multiply, and adding bodies often creates more noise than progress. He borrows an image that sticks: a locomotive (the core team) pulling a long train of specialist cars. Each car wants to go at its own speed — some want to accelerate, others to brake — and the result is friction and tearing.
That friction shows up as feature creep, rushed pre-production, and vertical slices that prove a concept but don’t guarantee the assembled game will feel cohesive when all systems interact. For systemic, emergent games — where the sum of systems is the point — a single vertical slice can’t capture the experience. You end up building a large part of the game just to test it, which is exactly what bloats timelines and budgets.
The small-core, co-dev model — what it looks like
Amancio suggests leaning into a film-like crew model: a tight, accountable core team that brings in specialists for the project’s needs. Co-development and outsourcing aren’t new, but his emphasis is on clearly defined boxes. Give a co-dev partner a contained system (he uses Black Flag’s naval mechanics as an example) with precise constraints and points of integration, then let them run.
That approach requires discipline. Too much freedom early on wastes time; too little and you stifle creativity. The trick is sharp direction: clear constraints that still leave room for craft. He believes constraints are actually the creative engine — financial, technical, or artificial limits force teams away from the first obvious idea toward something more original.
Constraints as a design tool
It’s an argument you see across creative mediums. Remove a tool or capability and you sometimes get a more elegant solution. Amancio points to features like Revelations’ bomb system — small systems that expose player agency and create emergent moments — as the sort of design you get when you work inside smart limits rather than expanding until everything collapses under its own weight.
He also stresses transparency within teams. When everyone understands the project pillars and constraints, they self-filter ideas before they hit the decision-makers. That cuts down the “throw more people at it” impulse and leaves more bandwidth for meaningful iteration.
Reuse, risks and the honesty test
One way to cut development time is reuse — the same city or assets across multiple projects. Some franchises, like Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s recurring Kamurochō, make that a feature players enjoy. Amancio thinks studios could explore honest reuse: ship something recognizably rooted in the same world but be candid about what’s new. Fans are more forgiving when studios aren’t trying to hide recycled work as novelty.
Of course, reuse trades off novelty for polish and cadence. It’s a business decision — faster releases, more curated narratives — and it can work if communicated honestly.
Why this matters beyond boards and budgets
The industry’s structural problems aren’t abstract. They ripple into labor relations, studio closures, and tooling changes. Big studios are experimenting with automation and AI for QA and other tasks, which reshapes workflows and headcount in real ways. That trend toward automating parts of development has already started to influence how companies staff projects and measure productivity (Square Enix’s push to automate QA is one example of this broader shift).
Meanwhile, layoffs and union tensions at major publishers underscore the human cost when big projects falter or strategies shift; those dynamics are part of the backdrop Amancio cites as evidence that the old model is unsustainable (recent dismissals and union tensions are a reminder). If the answer is smaller cores and smarter partnerships, it also needs to include better safety nets and clearer expectations for the people doing the work.
A practical, not nostalgic, argument
This isn’t a plea to go indie or a sloganeering “downsize for art” manifesto. Amancio’s approach is pragmatic: keep a lean, highly accountable nucleus; outsource or co-dev clearly defined modules; impose constraints that force creativity; and validate early with prototypes that actually represent the intended experience.
If that sounds like a lot of re-disciplining rather than radical rewriting, that’s the point. Big games will still be big — open worlds, complex systems, huge budgets — but the question is how to build them without turning production into a management problem first and a creative project second.
So will AAA studios bite? Some already are experimenting with hybrid models, reuse strategies, and tooling changes. Others will cling to the old calculus until the market (and their balance sheets) force a rethink. Either way, Amancio’s argument reframes a familiar complaint into a practical playbook: smaller cores, clearer boxes, and creative constraints might be the only way to keep AAA games ambitious without breaking the people who make them.
Is that a compromise or a smarter way forward? Depends who you ask — and who’s on the locomotive.