3 hours ago, pcmaster said:

Those off-the-shelf 'CGI assets' might not perform well enough and you might not be able to have as many of them (on screen) as you'd like for your specific game

You're still implying that everything's ready. It never is, things evolve and what worked 5 years ago isn't often enough today. Your team will have to constantly accommodate for that continuous change. That requires people and time. Even if you throw really a lot of money into it (buy a lot of 3rd party/outsourced solutions and assets), you might need a surprising number of your own people integrating it.

I'm not sure if I'm making much sense or just sound too pessimistic, I just see how much man-time things seem to take in a AAA studio...

I am not talking off the shelf assets but graphics our designers have already made.

AAA development just means you have a very huge, expensive team. Your question translates to "how small can a team be to still call it huge and expensive". The answer is simple and meaningless: Get as many as you can for as much as you can afford. That isn't strictly limited by your pockets, but rather by what you want to spend. How much you want to spend, on the other side, can depend on things like "how much are we going to sell?", which might be far less than your pockets are deep.

You might expect that in a AAA (senior) team, things will be more structured, but the opposite is the case (Just ask anyone here, they will "tell you stories"). Far more things will go wrong, far more things will happen than you can handle and resolve, but that's when the advantage of an AAA team will come into play. On average, you can expect things will turn out fine. If you hire 100 peps, you won't be able to avoid bad apples and Wallys, but the average dev will be someone who does his work and does it just fine, their efficiency might be 90%. On average, you will get some 80% game. On average you will get your money back. In bad cases, it will be an Anthem or Homefront 2 game. In good cases, you might get a Bioshock, Crysis or Gears.

The key is: 1. you hire many many devs.  2. you don't really care about keeping it minimal, cause you want to get enough to keep the average at average. 3. You might want to add some experienced leads to the pool, but you'd rather hire 3 random non-senior/non-junior guys than one really skilled.

IF you deviate from this idea, by trying to keep it minimal, you completely shift your risk. Imagine you have 10 guys and 2 don't get along at all. Your project might be busted. You might get them to cooperate, but then it might just blow up and it's insanely difficult to replace one key member of a team of 10. ( Yes, sure, you could expect professionals to be professional, but many in the industry are ego driven and chances are high you will end up with one of these in your team. )

Also: Don't expect that a new AAA team means you get an AAA game, it might be just AA. And eveb AAA games don't lead to AAA sales.

On the other side. Minecraft might be not even an A game.

3 hours ago, ProfL said:

AAA development just means you have a very huge, expensive team. Your question translates to "how small can a team be to still call it huge and expensive". The answer is simple and meaningless: Get as many as you can for as much as you can afford. That isn't strictly limited by your pockets, but rather by what you want to spend. How much you want to spend, on the other side, can depend on things like "how much are we going to sell?", which might be far less than your pockets are deep.

You might expect that in a AAA (senior) team, things will be more structured, but the opposite is the case (Just ask anyone here, they will "tell you stories"). Far more things will go wrong, far more things will happen than you can handle and resolve, but that's when the advantage of an AAA team will come into play. On average, you can expect things will turn out fine. If you hire 100 peps, you won't be able to avoid bad apples and Wallys, but the average dev will be someone who does his work and does it just fine, their efficiency might be 90%. On average, you will get some 80% game. On average you will get your money back. In bad cases, it will be an Anthem or Homefront 2 game. In good cases, you might get a Bioshock, Crysis or Gears.

The key is: 1. you hire many many devs.  2. you don't really care about keeping it minimal, cause you want to get enough to keep the average at average. 3. You might want to add some experienced leads to the pool, but you'd rather hire 3 random non-senior/non-junior guys than one really skilled.

IF you deviate from this idea, by trying to keep it minimal, you completely shift your risk. Imagine you have 10 guys and 2 don't get along at all. Your project might be busted. You might get them to cooperate, but then it might just blow up and it's insanely difficult to replace one key member of a team of 10. ( Yes, sure, you could expect professionals to be professional, but many in the industry are ego driven and chances are high you will end up with one of these in your team. )

Also: Don't expect that a new AAA team means you get an AAA game, it might be just AA. And eveb AAA games don't lead to AAA sales.

On the other side. Minecraft might be not even an A game.

I love that, but wouldn’t more devs everywhere also introduce more bugs that would require QA to work out? I get the ego as it is the same in the film world. 

Every developer creates bugs, one individual dev for the whole project might create less bugs than 2, as he knows more about the scope. But from some amount of devs, the bug count will depend on the scale of the project, less on the dev head count. (And to some degree based on the architecture of the software, but that's what every dev gonna tell you to sell his idea of how it should be). 

From my experience, big teams have a more predictable bug and burn down chart. If you have 3 programmers, every programmer has his area and all bugs in that area are mostly his to solve. There might be 2 or 3 critical on someones table and that might define how stressed out you are. In an AAA team, you get more of a factory feeling. After a week, you see about the average bugs/day for the team, you see who's behind and you can shift the bugs of e.g. one network programmer to another network programmer. When you see the burn down chart falling behind the schedule, you know it's not stuck on one programmer, but just the way it is. You can either cut features, mark bugs as wont fix/minor, or delay the shipping date. (If the burn down is just like 10% behind, you can also ask to work over time or a day more). All is quite predictable.

QA and other testing becomes more important in a AAA production, simply cause you can't ask one programmer or artist about the state, you don't even want them to make an assessment. You rather want independent tester who check for bug, but you ALSO want people from outside the dev team that will rate the game in various ways "Is it clear what you have to do?" "Is the UI meaningful" "Is it fun?" "what's the most similar game you know and how does it compare?" etc. That's really an advantage. Again: Your team of 10 might think a game is in a really good shape, you ship, and there are 1000 times the people playing it, with various hardware configurations etc. and you might get pretty bad feedback by that 1% that runs into some bugs. An independent QA might catch most of these bugs. (Edit: The QA is also like an independent factory, you might want a few core people, who know the game, and rotate the other QA people, to have a lot of fresh feedback every week. Nobody biased cause he knows the game for 12 months)

But that's really all about your original question. If you would ask "Can a small team create a AAA game?", it would be a different story.

10 minutes ago, Tom Sloper said:

From my experience, big teams have a more predictable bug and burn down chart

Didn't know that. I know that developers of the skill level specified in the OP's original question burn bugs down as quickly as they're found so they don't dog the project and add to the schedule. 

I believe that you didn't know that, because you don't know me, that's why you can't know my experience. But your reply is orthogonal to what you quoted. Speed vs Predictability. One is the slope of a function, the other is the variance. I have no doubt that most devs will burn bugs down as quickly as they can, that's not team size related, but there are always exceptions, for whatever reason.

The simple mathematical fact behind that is: The increase of the sample count, decreases the noise. Means: the more devs, the less the individual counts, but still all horses (supposedly) pull the game into the same direction.

If you invest $100M, you might prefer the kind of team that return you $120M in a year, like it works for other companies. Over a team, that might return you anything from $0M to $2000M, in several years. But it really depends whether you "invest" your savings or you "gamble" some pocket money.

And I replied to 'OP's original question'. He asked about the minimal AAA team, which (and I repeat that every post ), is not the same as a team that makes an AAA game. You can fund a $115M AAA team that burns money on APB ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APB:_All_Points_Bulletin ) or you can invest in a small team like Obsidian (afaik 30 devs at that time) who create the best modern Fallout game. (With quite some tech problems, but regarding fans, still the best Fallout)

49 minutes ago, GildedOctopusStudios said:

You would also need writers, a cloud, backups, and IT to take care of it. You could cut out a lot of costs by otherwise only having remote employees. I think you would have to throw a lot of money at it and have a fantastic 20+ team though to get it done in 2 years.  

This started as hypothetical, I know I would need writers and a cloud. In my current position we already have that for film production. I was wondering how many devs and designers, etc...as a hypothetical situation to distract me from boredom.