Speaking at the Paris GDC, Media Molecule’s Mark Healey took a moment to point out a common misconception he believes fuels the game industry. Healey took a stab at the myth of needing a big development team, stating:

"One of the interesting things about the titles shown here is that the team sizes vary quite a lot. I think there’s a misconception in the games industry at the moment that you need 200 people to make a game now because technology is so amazing. But actually, some of the recent very successful games had teams of about four or five people - for example, Brain Training."

It’s an interesting observation to make, as a lot of times members of both the development side and journalism side of games put too much stock in how many people are working on a game. Sure, having 200 folks banging out code and fine-tuning animations can be nice, but that also means there are more places where things can go wrong, not to mention that trying to reach consensus on any aspect of a project with that many cooks in the kitchen can be quite a tall order.

Alex Evans, the other co-founder of Media Molecule, told the crowd that he believed that a small, focused team can be just as successful and produce just as good a game as a larger group. Words like these, coming from the lips of the head of a studio which is working on one of the PS3’s most anticipated games, should be sweet nectar to those developers working in smaller studios or individuals who would prefer to be a big a fish in a small pond, rather than vice versa. Healey and Evans truly believe in quality over quantity, and their take is that it doesn’t matter how many people are working on the project; if the team really loves what they’re doing, it will show.