Sometimes face to face teams don’t work well either.
A “bunch of strangers” put together won’t work, there must be a binding somewhere, be it contract/money or personal contact/friendship / mutual respect.
I believe this is part of the reason why there’s so feel females working as game programmers, “green males” feel very uncomfortable working with them around and when it comes to making a decision about who’s in, most vote for that white guy who looks exactly like themselves and seems to “fit company culture well”.
Many public companies are trying to change that, but majority are still the same.
I see often in indie cases when they are successful the core of that team, when money isn’t involved, they are basically a couple or siblings, parents or childhood friends, etc.