You can ”make it work” certainly but there are ”a lot of other things that you lose” like studio culture. You get ”less traction” with more. DICE wants more IP to work on.
”At DICE we’re about 200 people, something like that, and not everyone has been working on this product. Right now, more or less everybody is. We have much less people - it’s more or less like one studio working on this,” said GM Karl Magnus Troedsson.
”It’s going to come down to what we want to do with the games in the future; maybe we need more bandwidth, so to say, from people - then we’ll continue growing and getting more people in.” Activision employs around 500 people for the Call of Duty franchise, across multiple studios like Infinity Ward, Treyarch and now Sledgehammer Games.
”I, personally, don’t believe in distributed development,” said Troedsson.
”I believe you can definitely make it work, but there’s a lot of other things that you lose by doing this - anything from the kind of culture that you want to keep within the company, to it’s going to be harder with ownership.”
”And also, the more people you throw on a project, the less traction you get; you get more overhead, you get more red tape, and all these kind of things. We try to keep things pretty lean and mean when it comes to our development process,” he continued.
”We want as many people as possible, preferably all of them, sitting at DICE and sitting close at hand so we can work very tightly together.”
”If the question is are we are ready to continue investing to make Battlefield even bigger in the future?” said Troedsson. ”The answer is definitely yes.”
DICE want to do other things beside work solely on the Battlefield series, although that will always be a part of what they do. ”At DICE we are naturally very very focused on making Battlefield games,” said the Swedish general manager.
”I’m not talking about just Battlefield 3 of course. As a studio we’re also dedicated to making sure that we’re not only working on Battlefield games. It’s part of our strategy, so to say, that moving forward we want to look into making other games.”
”By no means am I now confirming that we’re working on Mirror’s Edge - don’t write that!” he joked. ”But it is our ambition is to work on other titles as well.”
”We have been helping out on other projects within EA and doing these sorts of things,” he continued. One such project they’ve helped with is Need for Speed: The Run as it uses DICE’s Frostbite Engine 2 technology.
”But we are game developers at heart and we are eager to come up with new concepts and try them out, and some of them might see the light of day and actually be released as real titles, and some of them will perhaps become prototypes that we can learn something from, and that we can put into some of our bigger titles that are actually on the shipped-plan, so to say.” Battlefield 3 releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC October 28th.
