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GamesRadar
GamesRadar
Technology
Jordan Gerblick

Astro Bot director says precisely what the industry needs to hear: "It's OK to make a small game" because "players today have a backlog of games" they can't complete

Astro Bot.

Following its Game of the Year win at last year's Game Awards, Astro Bot just took home another award, this time for having a director that's saying exactly what the video game industry needs to hear right now. Yes, I made up the award.

Speaking during a Game Developers Conference panel that GamesRadar+ attended, Team Asobi studio head Nicolas Doucet said the goal at the outset of making Astro Bot was to make a game that could be finished in a reasonable amount of time.

"From the start, we were in the mindset that it's OK to make a compact game ... it's OK to make a small game," said Doucet. "So for us, it means that we're making something of such scale that we can control it fully. That's from a development standpoint. But not only that. For the players, we all know that players today have a backlog of games and cannot complete their games, so the prospect of a game you can actually complete is a really persuasive argument."

Persuasive, indeed. Doucet is so persuasive that I think I'll go ahead and do another Astro Bot run instead of playing Assassin's Creed Shadows. That's not true, but the point is, there are too many Assassin's Creed Shadows-sized games, and I'm at the point where I'm begging for mercy. My backlog can't take another massive RPG - it'll crumble under its own mighty weight.

Anyway, yes, please make more small games, people. Even if my personal pleas are falling on unsympathetic ears, remember that Astro Bot is a small game, and it won Game of the Year. You can do it too.

Team Asobi’s gigantic 2024 proves it's time to free Astro Bot from PlayStation’s past.

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