chet faliszek thinks giant dev teams only make sense for gta 6

Saw Chet Faliszek's take floating around and it kinda hits different after the extended look. He's the former Valve writer, and his whole point is that giant teams just don't work in game dev. Except for GTA 6 apparently.

He also said Valve doesn't need to get any bigger. Which makes sense when you think about how Valve ships stuff. Smaller teams, longer cycles, whatever they do with Steam.

But Rockstar is the one exception he called out. A game like GTA 6 needs that many people because the scope is absurd. You can't have a couple hundred devs handcrafting Vice City, the Keys, Port Gellhorn, all the systems, all the NPC behavior we saw in the extended look. It's a different beast.

I've seen people argue that big teams cause bloat and mismanagement. And sure, that happens. But Rockstar's been doing this for decades. They've shipped GTA V, RDR2, and now they're a year out from GTA 6. The scale of that game is the whole reason the team size makes sense.

What gets me is the implication for other studios. Everyone wants to chase the Rockstar model, but most of them can't manage a team that size. Faliszek's point is probably that you shouldn't try unless your game actually demands it. GTA 6 does. Some live service shooter with a battle pass doesn't.

Anyway, just nice to see someone from outside Rockstar acknowledge that GTA 6 is a different category of project. Makes the November wait feel a little more justified.

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Source: GamesRadar+ · Curated content.