What Is The Average Size For a Typical Game Development Team?

Hello, I wanted to kick this off by asking the question in the title: What Is The Average Size For a Typical Game Development Team? I come from a background of using RPG Maker XP for about 6 or so years, and I’m still working on a project that has lasted me all throughout those 6 years with only me, a conceptual artist for characters, and a spriter with me being the story writer, programmer, eventer and map designer. With me transitioning to UE4 for the sake of just wanting to learn something new while working on my 6-year long project, I contemplated wanting to make a game with a team of other developers (after I watch several hours worth of UE4 tutorials on the Unreal Engine YT page and get a grasp for the system in question).

But, I ask this question to generally get a feel for what an average, non-AAA studio/dev team who want to make a game and don’t have a stupidly high budget. Because, generally AAA studios have upwhere to around 100+ devs.

Also, how SHOULD a typical dev team look? Say for example you are a person with a budget of around… 200,000 dollars or so and you, the creator of your game, have the knowledge and capabilities of designing levels and with a programming background. How many of an artist, additional programmer, modeller, etc. should you have? If it was me, I’d have a team that would look like your typical, old-school JRPG:

  • Level designer (Warrior?)
  • Programmer (Thief?)
  • Modeller (Black Mage?)
  • Artist (conceptual or otherwise) (White Mage?)

For the budget that I have, it’d be something like that. What about you, the reader, what do you suggest or how would you go about doing this? How many people, on average, are there for a typical team with a budget around that much and how would you distribute your team members responsibilities?

I’ve worked with 1 up to 30 ppl…
But some companies have 1000+ (and fire almost everyone after development is done).
Game dev is very hard to be called “stable job”.

It depends on too many things like time, money, and skill

these days probably 1.5 is a common size

Whoa, I never knew that was a thing. I’m going to assume most devs. like yourself do freelance stuff on the side or even take up positions in games on the forums to make up for times with lack of work?

That’s a peculiar number. Why say that? I’m asking mostly because I’m curious if that’s like someone on the side who works a little bit but only some of the time.

Haha that is quite true, too much time spent on the computer and you end up fatter than when you started.

I’m pretty sure the Programmer would be a necromancer…

Sometimes the code just works… Like it rose from the dead!

Anywhere between 1 and 300 would probably not be an entirely wrong answer. There are absolutely no strict rules on team composition as it heavily depends on the people you have and their skill levels. Established teams have their own workflows that vary drastically from team to team so there’s barely any consistency there either. At the end of the day you just have to find the people that’ll get the job done.

Average size: 5.

[Citation needed]