Sims 4's development is ending?

"@Phuxion;c-16350731" wrote:
There are not 200 artists and programmers working on The Sims 4 team or rather if they had the ability to pull off something like The Sims 5 with The Sims 4 staff you'd see more of a significant output from The Sims 4 team in terms of content, turn around time, etc. Even if they pooled the resources of The Sims 4, Sims 4 console, and Mobile teams together they still couldn't make a Sims 5 game to the degree that people are demanding/expecting.

Also let me let in a sad unspoken truth of the credits from a lot of major company titles. Not everyone's name you see in credits worked on the game or had anything to do with the game and I'm not just talking higher positions like the CEO of a company.

One of the best examples I can demonstrate this with is the game Scott Pilgrim Vs The World.

The bottom of this blog post from what cut from the game details how small the development team was for the game...

https://boutain.blogspot.com/2010/08/scott-pilgrim-vs-world-game_23.html

//// This is as good as it gets!
We've worked on this project for a year, half of it in Montreal where we were unfortunately very poorly managed, with an unqualified team and inappropriate tools which all got the game nearly canceled and drove everybody on the core team near depression. Then we had 5 crazy über intensive months in Chengdu's studio, where we had no time left and were all going completely crazy trying to pull this off.

Now it's done, it's out there and it should still kick plum pretty good!

Jonathan Lavigne was game designer;

Paul Robertson was lead animator on this and did all playable characters and strikers, almost all bosses and other things here and there;

Animation wise Justin Cyr, Jonathan Kim (persona) and Mariel Cartwright (kinuko) did pretty much all the rest

We also had a lot of help from most of Chengdu's studio, mostly on the programming and secondary animation side;

And I was in charge of all the backgrounds and over all graphics supervision as you can see here.

Hope you guys will like it!

Now weigh that against the game's 14 minute credit sequence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRZ9B7M62-Q

Who the heck are all these other people? How does the small staff described above warrant a 14 minute credit sequence?

The truth of the matter is that you can find a number of the same people with the same exact credit to their name in many Ubisoft titles released around that time. There are credits for regions and translations for countries the game never came out in or was translated into. So what you have here is a case where Ubisoft (the publisher of the game) is including people in credits who didn't work on the game but saying that they did? To what end? Is it so all these people can pad out their resumes and potentially get more work as a result of having shipped X number of games? FYI the number of completed games a person has shipped looks good a game developers resume. You don't want to have stuff like "Worked on Duke Nukem Forever for a decade" on there. You want a wide variety.

On one hand this can be seen as a good thing for the people who's names are in the credits as it potentially leads to more work for them in the future, but is that really fair to the small team of people that really did all the work?

When I say 200 I only count people listed in the credits who are full-time employees at The Sims Studio (i.e. the Redwood Shores location). The entire credits have like 400+ people if you count everyone.

SimGuruDrake for example is listed in the credits but I'm not counting her as she works for EA communication and not The Sims Studio.

The following positions are what I counted (including those listed under additional contributors as they work on TS4 but did not work on that particular pack; SimGuruGraham for example are always listed as additional contributors for EPs and GPs because he only works on stuff packs).

Producers
Development directors
Artists
Designers
Engineers
Audio director/editors (voice actors are not included)
Development QA testers working at The Sims studio (those who work at a different location don't count)

That's it. I don't include people like artists working at external studios, marketing people working at EA, or anyone on the localization team. It's absolutely accurate when I say roughly 200 full-time employees are working on TS4.

"Phuxion;c-1635073 wrote:

I'm talking about the difference in staff of when The Sims 4 was in full on production compared to the size of the Sims 4 team now. It's not anywhere close

Yes it's very close. Your idea that many people left since TS4's launch and thus only of fraction of people are left is very wrong. I remember SimGuruRachel reported that there were over 100 people working on TS4 back when TS4 was first announced (the game obviously was in full-production at the time). There are still easily 100+ people working on TS4 now.

First of all, I want to tell you about the team behind the scenes. We have over 100 people working on The Sims 4 and many of them are the names that you recognize behind The Sims 3.

Source: http://forums.thesims.com/en_us/discussion/comment/10739760/#Comment_10739760