Also, while the games got more complex, the tools to make them got more powerful and affordable too.

A tiny handful of great games in a multibillion dollar industry. Portal and L4D were done by relatively small teams, no clue about Bioshock but I can’t imagine they had hundreds of people working on it. GTA4’s stellarness is highly debatable.

You can make that argument going all the way back to the Atari 2600, maybe even before that. That’s as far back as I can remember. Granted, a big team at the time was one with a programmer *and* an artist, but that didn’t help the quality. There was a ton of crap then, and there is a ton of crap now. Movies and television are the same. The only difference the slimming of the big companies will make, is that they crap they produce will be developed at a more reasonable price. This means nothing to the consumer.

Guido Jones :

Mist :Does anyone think that the slimming down of these ’software factories’ might actually improve the quality of the software delivered? It sucks for the people losing their jobs but these massive design studios haven’t produced much for quality the past few years, and have completely failed to produce games that are more ‘fun’ than back when games didn’t have 100 man teams.
Or is that just nostalgia speaking?

Last couple of years have produced stellar games – Bioshock, Mass Effect, Portal, Left4Dead, GTA4. Or were you talking MMO’s only.

A tiny handful of great games in a multibillion dollar industry. Portal and L4D were done by relatively small teams, no clue about Bioshock but I can’t imagine they had hundreds of people working on it. GTA4′s stellarness is highly debatable.

Mist :Does anyone think that the slimming down of these ’software factories’ might actually improve the quality of the software delivered? It sucks for the people losing their jobs but these massive design studios haven’t produced much for quality the past few years, and have completely failed to produce games that are more ‘fun’ than back when games didn’t have 100 man teams.
Or is that just nostalgia speaking?

Last couple of years have produced stellar games – Bioshock, Mass Effect, Portal, Left4Dead, GTA4. Or were you talking MMO’s only.

That doesn’t mean that companies that make them are operating under the same set of rules that they were a year ago. It’s not just consumers who are getting squeezed on new credit or who have an incentive to hold onto cash.

Mist :
Does anyone think that the slimming down of these ’software factories’ might actually improve the quality of the software delivered?

No. As soon as there is money, they’ll restaff at the same skillset they were already succeeding in the market with and carry on with life.