Call of Duty: Black Ops credits 60 artists. It's very clear, watching Minecraft, that they have hired zero artists.
Making a commercial game is not merely about hiring 900 average developers. Frankly it's becoming clear to me that many people posting here have never been involved in a large creative project, even something as common as stage crew in your high school musical.
I don’t get the point you are making. Could you elaborate?
I don’t really see the connection to Minecraft. It managed to be commercially successful and critically acclaimed without any artists, isn’t that just the point? It’s nice that economies of scale allow us to throw 60 artists at a game and that’s something independent games can probably never deliver but that doesn’t automatically make games by big studios better than those that cannot afford 60 artists.
I don’t really see the connection to Minecraft. It managed to be commercially successful and critically acclaimed without any artists, isn’t that just the point?
The main difference between Notch and EA is not that EA has 900 "thoroughly average" developers, that's the point. If EA has 900 developers it's probably because they have dozens of projects going on at the same time. The difference is that EA's approach to game development typically requires a diverse array of specialized talent, which incurs administrative and organizational overhead, which is costly and slows everyone down at least a little. But, the goal is a game that could not be made by just one person. The number of "notch-like" developers they may have would just be one factor in the success of the game.
EA is old, enormous, and there is almost certainly full of bureaucratic inefficiency and mismanagement that a single programmer won't have, but "900 thoroughly average developers" aren't representative of those resources.
Call of Duty: Black Ops credits 60 artists. It's very clear, watching Minecraft, that they have hired zero artists.
Making a commercial game is not merely about hiring 900 average developers. Frankly it's becoming clear to me that many people posting here have never been involved in a large creative project, even something as common as stage crew in your high school musical.