The year we got two EPs was the year after release. Firstly, one came early in the year, the other came much later. Also, one of those packs? That was Get To Work. Not a sterling example of perfection in a pack, with all the fixes and patches going on. You want another Get To Work?
One of the problems here is that we see the years different from EA. EA doesn't think of the current year as 2017 but instead as FY18 (fiscal year 2018) which started on April 1 2017 and ends on March 2018. So in EA's terminology we didn't get 2 EPs in 2015 but only one in FY15 and another one in FY16.
And secondly, it's not an unfair assumption that these packs were being worked on WHILE the game was being worked on. It takes over a year to create an EP.
This is a popular assumption. But it is very unlikely to be true because earlier Maxis (or the studio in Salt Lake City) had no problem about letting the same team release 2 EPs each year. The executive producer for TS2 even told us that they only had used 3 months to make a just released EP. So I don't buy the assumption that a full team now suddenly has become so unscilled that it cant make an EP in less than a year. The problem is though that there is nothing stopping a game designer from designing the next EP while the rest of the team is still working on the previous one. So if this design time is included then it is correct that it can take a full year. But I still think that the main reason that EA now only has released one EP each year is that the team who made the previous EP had to make a GP and maybe a SP too before they really could start working on the next EP.
The Store was terrible. Really, first you buy points, THEN you buy items. It's better value to buy more points (meaning one point does not have a consistent value), THEN it's better value to buy collections. 1000 Simpoints is £6. However a Deliciously Indulgent Bakery is 1,900 Simpoints for 17 items, the majority of which will only be really useful in your DIB. CAS stuff was equally bad considering the fact that you can only wear so much at a time.
I'm so glad the Store is gone. Really, it was extortionate.
I agree that stuff seem to sell much better in SPs than in the Store. So I am quite sure that this also is the reason why EA now mainly focus on SPs instead. But only if we include the SPs and not the Store we can still say that TS4 gets expansions for about the same amount of money each year as TS3 did.
The year we got two EPs was the year after release. Firstly, one came early in the year, the other came much later. Also, one of those packs? That was Get To Work. Not a sterling example of perfection in a pack, with all the fixes and patches going on. You want another Get To Work?
And secondly, it's not an unfair assumption that these packs were being worked on WHILE the game was being worked on. It takes over a year to create an EP.
The Store was terrible. Really, first you buy points, THEN you buy items. It's better value to buy more points (meaning one point does not have a consistent value), THEN it's better value to buy collections. 1000 Simpoints is £6. However a Deliciously Indulgent Bakery is 1,900 Simpoints for 17 items, the majority of which will only be really useful in your DIB. CAS stuff was equally bad considering the fact that you can only wear so much at a time.
I'm so glad the Store is gone. Really, it was extortionate.
GTW was absolutely being developed before TS4 released, so was Outdoor Retreat, and the Luxury Party SP. The fact that they released the second EP around 6 months after GTW tells me it was probably started before GTW came out.
The year we got two EPs was the year after release. Firstly, one came early in the year, the other came much later. Also, one of those packs? That was Get To Work. Not a sterling example of perfection in a pack, with all the fixes and patches going on. You want another Get To Work?
And secondly, it's not an unfair assumption that these packs were being worked on WHILE the game was being worked on. It takes over a year to create an EP.
The Store was terrible. Really, first you buy points, THEN you buy items. It's better value to buy more points (meaning one point does not have a consistent value), THEN it's better value to buy collections. 1000 Simpoints is £6. However a Deliciously Indulgent Bakery is 1,900 Simpoints for 17 items, the majority of which will only be really useful in your DIB. CAS stuff was equally bad considering the fact that you can only wear so much at a time.
I'm so glad the Store is gone. Really, it was extortionate.
GTW was absolutely being developed before TS4 released, so was Outdoor Retreat, and the Luxury Party SP. The fact that they released the second EP around 6 months after GTW tells me it was probably started before GTW came out.
I agree that they likely were planned before TS4 was even released. But just because one or two game designers made some planning this doesn't really mean that they were much in development before the rest of the team began to work on them too. And it doesn't matter much if just a single programmer also was testing some things for the game designers.
I still don't understand what people think make TS4 so huge and complicated that the EPs now should take 2 or even 3 times as long time to develop compared to the EPs for TS2 and TS3? Do you really think that TS4 is a that much bigger game?
The year we got two EPs was the year after release. Firstly, one came early in the year, the other came much later. Also, one of those packs? That was Get To Work. Not a sterling example of perfection in a pack, with all the fixes and patches going on. You want another Get To Work?
And secondly, it's not an unfair assumption that these packs were being worked on WHILE the game was being worked on. It takes over a year to create an EP.
The Store was terrible. Really, first you buy points, THEN you buy items. It's better value to buy more points (meaning one point does not have a consistent value), THEN it's better value to buy collections. 1000 Simpoints is £6. However a Deliciously Indulgent Bakery is 1,900 Simpoints for 17 items, the majority of which will only be really useful in your DIB. CAS stuff was equally bad considering the fact that you can only wear so much at a time.
I'm so glad the Store is gone. Really, it was extortionate.
GTW was absolutely being developed before TS4 released, so was Outdoor Retreat, and the Luxury Party SP. The fact that they released the second EP around 6 months after GTW tells me it was probably started before GTW came out.
I agree that they likely were planned before TS4 was even released. But just because one or two game designers made some planning this doesn't really mean that they were much in development before the rest of the team began to work on them too. And it doesn't matter much if just a single programmer also was testing some things for the game designers.
I still don't understand what people think make TS4 so huge and complicated that the EPs now should take 2 or even 3 times as long time to develop compared to the EPs for TS2 and TS3? Do you really think that TS4 is a that much bigger game?
Because it has been said by Maxis devs, because it's a phenomenon that isn't specific to Maxis but is widespread in the whole AAA industry and confirmed by other game devs and because modders can go and check themselves. Why do you think making an EP in 2017 hasn't changed compared to 2005 ? What proof do you have ?
The year we got two EPs was the year after release. Firstly, one came early in the year, the other came much later. Also, one of those packs? That was Get To Work. Not a sterling example of perfection in a pack, with all the fixes and patches going on. You want another Get To Work?
And secondly, it's not an unfair assumption that these packs were being worked on WHILE the game was being worked on. It takes over a year to create an EP.
The Store was terrible. Really, first you buy points, THEN you buy items. It's better value to buy more points (meaning one point does not have a consistent value), THEN it's better value to buy collections. 1000 Simpoints is £6. However a Deliciously Indulgent Bakery is 1,900 Simpoints for 17 items, the majority of which will only be really useful in your DIB. CAS stuff was equally bad considering the fact that you can only wear so much at a time.
I'm so glad the Store is gone. Really, it was extortionate.
GTW was absolutely being developed before TS4 released, so was Outdoor Retreat, and the Luxury Party SP. The fact that they released the second EP around 6 months after GTW tells me it was probably started before GTW came out.
I agree that they likely were planned before TS4 was even released. But just because one or two game designers made some planning this doesn't really mean that they were much in development before the rest of the team began to work on them too. And it doesn't matter much if just a single programmer also was testing some things for the game designers.
I still don't understand what people think make TS4 so huge and complicated that the EPs now should take 2 or even 3 times as long time to develop compared to the EPs for TS2 and TS3? Do you really think that TS4 is a that much bigger game?
Because it has been said by Maxis devs, because it's a phenomenon that isn't specific to Maxis but is widespread in the whole AAA industry and confirmed by other game devs and because modders can go and check themselves. Why do you think making an EP in 2017 hasn't changed compared to 2005 ? What proof do you have ?
The Maxis devs have (to my knowledge) only said that the structure of the teams is different and that an EP like Cats and Dogs already began to be planned at least 3 yrs ago. But we know that the team in Salt Lake City quickly were able to make even 4 new EPs for TS3 after they suddenly were asked to do this by EA.
I don't disagree that things change. But the purpose of new development tools sure isn't to make everything into taking 2 to 4 times as long time such that the development cost for each EP can become much bigger and EA's profit therefore go down. I can believe that the new structure makes it possible to much more easily move developers between teams such that each developer can be utilized more efficiently. But unless EA for some mysterious reason should want costs to increase instead of going down this just means that the expansions are developed by often changing teams that in average are much smaller than the more fixed teams that EA earlier used.
Also we know that EA closed the Salt Lake studio down because EA didn't think that this studio was needed anymore and most likely because making the Sims 4 expansions doesn't need as many devs working on them as the Sims 3 expansions did. I can easily understand that too because SPs don't need much programming and can be made by very small teams that mainly consists of almost only artists.
You won't find something similar for other games. An example is sports games that become bigger and bigger for each new version. But a new version is still released every year anyway.
Sure new tools are meant to do things faster but I honestly believe their multitasking system makes adding stuff much harder. It's just my impression that everything has to be coded into that system and it still causes a lot of issues tbh. Just look at how they implemented toddlers, that says enough about how hard it is to make all this stuff work well together.
Sure new tools are meant to do things faster but I honestly believe their multitasking system makes adding stuff much harder. It's just my impression that everything has to be coded into that system and it still causes a lot of issues tbh. Just look at how they implemented toddlers, that says enough about how hard it is to make all this stuff work well together.
If that had been the case then I don't believe that EA ever would have added multitasking to the game because EA sure doesn't want the development costs to go up at all. But of course I accept that the multitasking doesn't make things easier to develop and likely makes everything about as hard as the huge open world in TS3 did. But the new structure still just means that the developers are divided into more teams and more often are transferred between teams. So with the Sims Mobile and likely also TS5 in development too things most likely just take more time because the average size of the teams has become smaller.
Toddlers were obviously never planned to be released for TS4 at all. Otherwise they would have been in the basegame or at least planned to be included in some EP and not to be released 2 yrs later in a free update after a lot of fuss about them all over the internet - and something that only can have hurt the sales numbers quite much in those 2 yrs. So EA just finally realized that the missing toddlers had hurt the sales numbers unacceptably much and therefore saw no other thing to do except suddenly telling the devs to make them anyway and to release them for free to stop all the fuss about them.
Technology isn't some magical wand that makes work happens faster. Better graphics, better environment, more in-depth gameplay systems, all that takes more time to make, so the team size have skyrocketed in AAA games. It's not uncommon now to have teams with several hundreds, while they were around dozens two decades ago. To give you an idea, GTA III had a team of 150 developpers, GTA V had 1,000. Development costs are increasing in the AAA industry. They still make a profit because the revenues are increasing too.
Technology isn't some magical wand that makes work happens faster. Better graphics, better environment, more in-depth gameplay systems, all that takes more time to make, so the team size have skyrocketed in AAA games. It's not uncommon now to have teams with several hundreds, while they were around dozens two decades ago. To give you an idea, GTA III had a team of 150 developpers, GTA V had 1,000. Development costs are increasing in the AAA industry. They still make a profit because the revenues are increasing too.
Things are much more complicated than that and I don't believe that the work now is that much bigger because if it was then the prices would have increased just as much or the game companies would have gone bankrupt unless they now released much fewer games which therefore sold many times more.
An example that suggests the opposite is if we compare with a very old game like M1 Tank Platoon which was released by Microprose in 1989 for Atari ST, Amiga and MS-DOS. To make it possible for us to control 4 advanced tanks and support units and still make it possible to let the game be played from a diskette drive they had to program everything in assembler which is a very low level as a programming language and therefore a huge work. But today programmers instead use huge automatic code generating tools which make the work many times smaller. It also makes the finished program slower and about 10 times as big. But with current hardware who cares?
Huge games are still made by studios who often only has about 60 developers. The Sims Freeplay is just an example and Firemonkeys are able to make other games too and releasing new stuff for Freeplay every week. We don't know the total number of developers in Maxis. But we know that Maxis makes more games at the same time than ever before and therefore likely now use much smaller development teams as EA seems to have reduced the size of Maxis instead of increasing it.
Sure new tools are meant to do things faster but I honestly believe their multitasking system makes adding stuff much harder. It's just my impression that everything has to be coded into that system and it still causes a lot of issues tbh. Just look at how they implemented toddlers, that says enough about how hard it is to make all this stuff work well together.
If that had been the case then I don't believe that EA ever would have added multitasking to the game because EA sure doesn't want the development costs to go up at all. But of course I accept that the multitasking doesn't make things easier to develop and likely makes everything about as hard as the huge open world in TS3 did. But the new structure still just means that the developers are divided into more teams and more often are transferred between teams. So with the Sims Mobile and likely also TS5 in development too things most likely just take more time because the average size of the teams has become smaller.
Toddlers were obviously never planned to be released for TS4 at all. Otherwise they would have been in the basegame or at least planned to be included in some EP and not to be released 2 yrs later in a free update after a lot of fuss about them all over the internet - and something that only can have hurt the sales numbers quite much in those 2 yrs. So EA just finally realized that the missing toddlers had hurt the sales numbers unacceptably much and therefore saw no other thing to do except suddenly telling the devs to make them anyway and to release them for free to stop all the fuss about them.
The way I personally see it - without any evidence - is that you're probably right that toddlers weren't a fixed plan from the start. I think they toyed with the idea (which I see as the cause of a couple of confusing and later on upsetting statements simmers got) but didn't manage or didn't want to, or simply couldn't finish it. And I also think you're right that someone somewhere must have realised that this one in particular, more than anything else, created a huge rift between developers and simmers that no content, no matter how awesome, would have all that easily fixed. Sure, some people didn't care, some enjoyed it regardless, some hate toddlers, etc. etc., but it's hard to deny just how much coverage and bad press their omission in particular got. It's hard to deny that it was responsible for a lot of the tension we've had on these forums. So I agree: had this not happened, if more people really and honestly hadn't cared or thought it was a big deal or eve symptomatic of a larger problem, I don't think we'd have them today. I don't see, like you say, why they'd spend development budget on a feature no one's missing anyway - or just so barely, it's hardly noticeable (in, among other things, sales and customer satisfaction).
But I do believe that toddlers took longer to make than we might realise. Because multitasking is a difficult system to work around. Sure the open world had issues, but a lot of them were about too much stuff randomly spawning and getting stuck for no good reason and a good cleaner could reduce a lot of the issues this caused. How do you "clean up" multitasking? It's pretty much the basis of this entire game - it's why it's a feature that matters so much to simmers who like and dislike it alike. Multitasking is primarily responsible for the "all they do is talk talk talk" phenomenon that angers so many, and it was a lot worse when there was still less to do in this game. But the fact that your sim can walk up to any sim and have a chat while drinking coffee, reading a book, watching tv, playing stuff (except for some reason when using the bowling alley ... uch), or have coffee and food at the same time in one cue, swim and still interact with others, etc. etc. creates a kind of fluidity that is rather unique to the sims - and it is promising. I'm relatively sure we'll see it again in TS5 - and yes, I think it will work much better. In a sense, TS4 must've showed them the limits & the difficulties with this idea.
And again: you can see this best when you look at toddlers. How does a sim hold a glass of water and go get a toddler who's himself holding a tablet to then put it on the highchair while both are technically still able to have a chat? How do you prevent sims and toddlers cuing up lots of contradictory (albeit multitasking-capable) tasks & if you can't, how do you know which one to prioritise? I think the coding behind that is actually pretty fascinating .. just what I think. I can't prove it, but I can only imagine the difficulty in making this the main basis of your new sims game, then adding more and more and more and more content to it, without this system collapsing in on itself. We can see its cracks already, we know when and how it doesn't work. And for toddlers, it often just doesn't exist at all. How does the game prioritise the toddler? By nearly always prioritising the toddler, even the toddler's very own actions. Anyway lots of blabla just to say that I think we shouldn't underestimate this system as much as some like to do. We should realise that it creates difficulties (which are sure as hell going to pop up again with pets) that we didn't have in older games - not like this. And that might also explain why toddlers came so incredibly incredibly late
Sure new tools are meant to do things faster but I honestly believe their multitasking system makes adding stuff much harder. It's just my impression that everything has to be coded into that system and it still causes a lot of issues tbh. Just look at how they implemented toddlers, that says enough about how hard it is to make all this stuff work well together.
If that had been the case then I don't believe that EA ever would have added multitasking to the game because EA sure doesn't want the development costs to go up at all. But of course I accept that the multitasking doesn't make things easier to develop and likely makes everything about as hard as the huge open world in TS3 did. But the new structure still just means that the developers are divided into more teams and more often are transferred between teams. So with the Sims Mobile and likely also TS5 in development too things most likely just take more time because the average size of the teams has become smaller.
Toddlers were obviously never planned to be released for TS4 at all. Otherwise they would have been in the basegame or at least planned to be included in some EP and not to be released 2 yrs later in a free update after a lot of fuss about them all over the internet - and something that only can have hurt the sales numbers quite much in those 2 yrs. So EA just finally realized that the missing toddlers had hurt the sales numbers unacceptably much and therefore saw no other thing to do except suddenly telling the devs to make them anyway and to release them for free to stop all the fuss about them.
The way I personally see it - without any evidence - is that you're probably right that toddlers weren't a fixed plan from the start. I think they toyed with the idea (which I see as the cause of a couple of confusing and later on upsetting statements simmers got) but didn't manage or didn't want to, or simply couldn't finish it. And I also think you're right that someone somewhere must have realised that this one in particular, more than anything else, created a huge rift between developers and simmers that no content, no matter how awesome, would have all that easily fixed. Sure, some people didn't care, some enjoyed it regardless, some hate toddlers, etc. etc., but it's hard to deny just how much coverage and bad press their omission in particular got. It's hard to deny that it was responsible for a lot of the tension we've had on these forums. So I agree: had this not happened, if more people really and honestly hadn't cared or thought it was a big deal or eve symptomatic of a larger problem, I don't think we'd have them today. I don't see, like you say, why they'd spend development budget on a feature no one's missing anyway - or just so barely, it's hardly noticeable (in, among other things, sales and customer satisfaction).
I think that it is understandable that EA couldn't foresee that the missing toddlers would upset people much more than even the omission of the open world and the other simplifications about babies and teens would because TS1 had sold very well and EA also earlier had released Sims games without even kids for other platforms. But people became furious because they had expected TS4 to become more advanced than TS3 and instead EA had simplified the game and targeted it at new young teen simmers instead of the fans of the earlier game.
But I do believe that toddlers took longer to make than we might realise. Because multitasking is a difficult system to work around. Sure the open world had issues, but a lot of them were about too much stuff randomly spawning and getting stuck for no good reason and a good cleaner could reduce a lot of the issues this caused. How do you "clean up" multitasking? It's pretty much the basis of this entire game - it's why it's a feature that matters so much to simmers who like and dislike it alike. Multitasking is primarily responsible for the "all they do is talk talk talk" phenomenon that angers so many, and it was a lot worse when there was still less to do in this game. But the fact that your sim can walk up to any sim and have a chat while drinking coffee, reading a book, watching tv, playing stuff (except for some reason when using the bowling alley ... uch), or have coffee and food at the same time in one cue, swim and still interact with others, etc. etc. creates a kind of fluidity that is rather unique to the sims - and it is promising. I'm relatively sure we'll see it again in TS5 - and yes, I think it will work much better. In a sense, TS4 must've showed them the limits & the difficulties with this idea.
And again: you can see this best when you look at toddlers. How does a sim hold a glass of water and go get a toddler who's himself holding a tablet to then put it on the highchair while both are technically still able to have a chat? How do you prevent sims and toddlers cuing up lots of contradictory (albeit multitasking-capable) tasks & if you can't, how do you know which one to prioritise? I think the coding behind that is actually pretty fascinating .. just what I think. I can't prove it, but I can only imagine the difficulty in making this the main basis of your new sims game, then adding more and more and more and more content to it, without this system collapsing in on itself. We can see its cracks already, we know when and how it doesn't work. And for toddlers, it often just doesn't exist at all. How does the game prioritise the toddler? By nearly always prioritising the toddler, even the toddler's very own actions. Anyway lots of blabla just to say that I think we shouldn't underestimate this system as much as some like to do. We should realise that it creates difficulties (which are sure as plum going to pop up again with pets) that we didn't have in older games - not like this. And that might also explain why toddlers came so incredibly incredibly late
I admit that the toddlers were amazing when they finally were released. But this again just shows to me that EA was desperate. The sales numbers must have been very disappointing and EA therefore likely couldn't imagine any other way to improve them except releasing the most impressing toddlers for free.
I think that EA learned from this and most likely regretted to have simplified babies and teens too. So I therefore think that EA won't do any of those things for TS5 because EA now knows how extremely important babies, toddlers and teens are to so very many simmers.
Let's hope so indeed, cause if they could just release TS5 with all life stages included and relatively fleshed out from the get go, I think we'd all be very delighted about that (and it gives them time to focus on other things without full-on community rampage right from the start, so win-win)
What confuses me in this discussion, is that I’m in fact pretty much the same (bold). I’ve played Sims 3 on medium settings for years and looking back - looking at old pictures - I really have no idea how I managed to not care (I do care now by the way, couldn’t play the game on anything else than on highest settings anymore). It confuses me because it means I genuinely am trying to understand what people mean here concerning Sims 4 being that much different than Sims 1, 2 or 3 in this respect. Presenting it like it’s something new in this franchise (the realistic stylized approach) when it’s not. Sims 1, 2 ánd 3 are realistic stylized (be it with a different art style). As far as I can see the only difference is, that Sims 4 got rid of the ‘realistic’ by turning cartoony and simplifying the art style. Making it less ‘noisy’ like one of the devs once called it (referring to texture). Sims 2 looks outdated for me where it comes to the style of the sims, Sims 3 looks totally fine to me though I regret the limitations of CAS sometimes. But I’ve regretted that from the get go and it hasn’t got anything to do with the art style.
For what it's worth, it doesn't make much sense to me either. Probably would be an interesting area of study, how peoples' opinions on graphics form and change over time and the like.
I mean, back years ago (feels like ancient history now) I was playing this emulator for the old Star Wars Galaxies. Which is more or less a realistic style, as I recall, just very dated in its polygon count and the like. Back then, I had a very negative view of anything cartoony in a game. Star Wars: The Old Republic was coming out and I was curious about it because I was into the idea of a solid, modern Star Wars MMO. But I hated how the graphics looked. It was jarring and I couldn't imagine playing a Star Wars MMO that looked so cartoony.
Nonetheless, I gave the game a try in beta and then years after its release, got into for probably a good year of solid play; after that, I became much more accepting of the style. Somewhere in that there was an interlude where I was playing a much earlier version of this game and I was pretty ok with the graphics (or I got used to it, at least).
Jump to present and I barely notice anymore. There's still a small part of me that wishes for a more up-to-date realistic graphics for TS4, but on the whole, I don't give it much thought.
My experience where it comes to gaming is very limited, Sims 3 is the first (and only) game I ever played seriously. Other games I only know by watching my son playing them at times. I do understand what you mean, but at the same time I can imagine graphics and art style for this franchise might be slightly more essential than with other games, because you're literally stepping into a virtual dream world. That's the whole concept, living the life of your characters. I can imagine identifying with them might be more important than in other games? (I'm asking, I'm obviously not speaking from my own experience)
I never considered graphics and art style for one second when I started playing Sims 3 by the way, but it has become increasingly important over the years. I must add only after Sims 4 was announced and presented, I started realizing how much I love and appreciate Sims 3's art style and approach (which doesn't mean I think it's perfect btw, far from it). That simply is a matter of preference. I'd love a stylized though realistic art style for this franchise, in graphics, CAS and animations. I regret there is no escaping to what I call the silliness in Sims 4 (I don't mean that in an objective way, it's how it feels for me, every second I'm in the game).
Technology isn't some magical wand that makes work happens faster. Better graphics, better environment, more in-depth gameplay systems, all that takes more time to make, so the team size have skyrocketed in AAA games. It's not uncommon now to have teams with several hundreds, while they were around dozens two decades ago. To give you an idea, GTA III had a team of 150 developpers, GTA V had 1,000. Development costs are increasing in the AAA industry. They still make a profit because the revenues are increasing too.
Things are much more complicated than that and I don't believe that the work now is that much bigger because if it was then the prices would have increased just as much or the game companies would have gone bankrupt unless they now released much fewer games which therefore sold many times more.
An example that suggests the opposite is if we compare with a very old game like M1 Tank Platoon which was released by Microprose in 1989 for Atari ST, Amiga and MS-DOS. To make it possible for us to control 4 advanced tanks and support units and still make it possible to let the game be played from a diskette drive they had to program everything in assembler which is a very low level as a programming language and therefore a huge work. But today programmers instead use huge automatic code generating tools which make the work many times smaller. It also makes the finished program slower and about 10 times as big. But with current hardware who cares?
Huge games are still made by studios who often only has about 60 developers. The Sims Freeplay is just an example and Firemonkeys are able to make other games too and releasing new stuff for Freeplay every week. We don't know the total number of developers in Maxis. But we know that Maxis makes more games at the same time than ever before and therefore likely now use much smaller development teams as EA seems to have reduced the size of Maxis instead of increasing it.
And your assembler example shows it actually : we may have more efficient tool for a specific task, but we are no longer making games with a couple of units. Expectations are growing, and the workload too.
Technology isn't some magical wand that makes work happens faster. Better graphics, better environment, more in-depth gameplay systems, all that takes more time to make, so the team size have skyrocketed in AAA games. It's not uncommon now to have teams with several hundreds, while they were around dozens two decades ago. To give you an idea, GTA III had a team of 150 developpers, GTA V had 1,000. Development costs are increasing in the AAA industry. They still make a profit because the revenues are increasing too.
Things are much more complicated than that and I don't believe that the work now is that much bigger because if it was then the prices would have increased just as much or the game companies would have gone bankrupt unless they now released much fewer games which therefore sold many times more.
An example that suggests the opposite is if we compare with a very old game like M1 Tank Platoon which was released by Microprose in 1989 for Atari ST, Amiga and MS-DOS. To make it possible for us to control 4 advanced tanks and support units and still make it possible to let the game be played from a diskette drive they had to program everything in assembler which is a very low level as a programming language and therefore a huge work. But today programmers instead use huge automatic code generating tools which make the work many times smaller. It also makes the finished program slower and about 10 times as big. But with current hardware who cares?
Huge games are still made by studios who often only has about 60 developers. The Sims Freeplay is just an example and Firemonkeys are able to make other games too and releasing new stuff for Freeplay every week. We don't know the total number of developers in Maxis. But we know that Maxis makes more games at the same time than ever before and therefore likely now use much smaller development teams as EA seems to have reduced the size of Maxis instead of increasing it.
And your assembler example shows it actually : we may have more efficient tool for a specific task, but we are no longer making games with a couple of units. Expectations are growing, and the workload too.
Your example is from the Tomb Raider: Larry Croft games which are released in new versions about each year. I don't know much about those games. But they seem to become bigger and more detailed for every version which is opposite the Sims games which instead become more and more simplified. The Sims games also get smaller and smaller and more simplified expansions because they are targeted mainly at new young teen simmers. So I don't think that it is fair to compare them to games targeted mainly at 16 to 30 yrs olds that instead become bigger and more advanced for each version. It still seems to me that Maxis has more development teams than ever and that EA closed down the Salt Lake City studio because fewer devs were able to make the smaller and more simplified expansions for TS4 anyway.
Technology isn't some magical wand that makes work happens faster. Better graphics, better environment, more in-depth gameplay systems, all that takes more time to make, so the team size have skyrocketed in AAA games. It's not uncommon now to have teams with several hundreds, while they were around dozens two decades ago. To give you an idea, GTA III had a team of 150 developpers, GTA V had 1,000. Development costs are increasing in the AAA industry. They still make a profit because the revenues are increasing too.
Things are much more complicated than that and I don't believe that the work now is that much bigger because if it was then the prices would have increased just as much or the game companies would have gone bankrupt unless they now released much fewer games which therefore sold many times more.
An example that suggests the opposite is if we compare with a very old game like M1 Tank Platoon which was released by Microprose in 1989 for Atari ST, Amiga and MS-DOS. To make it possible for us to control 4 advanced tanks and support units and still make it possible to let the game be played from a diskette drive they had to program everything in assembler which is a very low level as a programming language and therefore a huge work. But today programmers instead use huge automatic code generating tools which make the work many times smaller. It also makes the finished program slower and about 10 times as big. But with current hardware who cares?
Huge games are still made by studios who often only has about 60 developers. The Sims Freeplay is just an example and Firemonkeys are able to make other games too and releasing new stuff for Freeplay every week. We don't know the total number of developers in Maxis. But we know that Maxis makes more games at the same time than ever before and therefore likely now use much smaller development teams as EA seems to have reduced the size of Maxis instead of increasing it.
And your assembler example shows it actually : we may have more efficient tool for a specific task, but we are no longer making games with a couple of units. Expectations are growing, and the workload too.
Your example is from the Tomb Raider: Larry Croft games which are released in new versions about each year. I don't know much about those games. But they seem to become bigger and more detailed for every version which is opposite the Sims games which instead become more and more simplified. The Sims games also get smaller and smaller and more simplified expansions because they are targeted mainly at new young teen simmers. So I don't think that it is fair to compare them to games targeted mainly at 16 to 30 yrs olds that instead become bigger and more advanced for each version. It still seems to me that Maxis has more development teams than ever and that EA closed down the Salt Lake City studio because fewer devs were able to make the smaller and more simplified expansions for TS4 anyway.
This game dev is taking Lara Croft as an example to illustrate why the team size are growing, he isn't saying it's something specific to Tomb Raider.
Technology isn't some magical wand that makes work happens faster. Better graphics, better environment, more in-depth gameplay systems, all that takes more time to make, so the team size have skyrocketed in AAA games. It's not uncommon now to have teams with several hundreds, while they were around dozens two decades ago. To give you an idea, GTA III had a team of 150 developpers, GTA V had 1,000. Development costs are increasing in the AAA industry. They still make a profit because the revenues are increasing too.
Things are much more complicated than that and I don't believe that the work now is that much bigger because if it was then the prices would have increased just as much or the game companies would have gone bankrupt unless they now released much fewer games which therefore sold many times more.
An example that suggests the opposite is if we compare with a very old game like M1 Tank Platoon which was released by Microprose in 1989 for Atari ST, Amiga and MS-DOS. To make it possible for us to control 4 advanced tanks and support units and still make it possible to let the game be played from a diskette drive they had to program everything in assembler which is a very low level as a programming language and therefore a huge work. But today programmers instead use huge automatic code generating tools which make the work many times smaller. It also makes the finished program slower and about 10 times as big. But with current hardware who cares?
Huge games are still made by studios who often only has about 60 developers. The Sims Freeplay is just an example and Firemonkeys are able to make other games too and releasing new stuff for Freeplay every week. We don't know the total number of developers in Maxis. But we know that Maxis makes more games at the same time than ever before and therefore likely now use much smaller development teams as EA seems to have reduced the size of Maxis instead of increasing it.
And your assembler example shows it actually : we may have more efficient tool for a specific task, but we are no longer making games with a couple of units. Expectations are growing, and the workload too.
Your example is from the Tomb Raider: Larry Croft games which are released in new versions about each year. I don't know much about those games. But they seem to become bigger and more detailed for every version which is opposite the Sims games which instead become more and more simplified. The Sims games also get smaller and smaller and more simplified expansions because they are targeted mainly at new young teen simmers. So I don't think that it is fair to compare them to games targeted mainly at 16 to 30 yrs olds that instead become bigger and more advanced for each version. It still seems to me that Maxis has more development teams than ever and that EA closed down the Salt Lake City studio because fewer devs were able to make the smaller and more simplified expansions for TS4 anyway.
This game dev is taking Lara Croft as an example to illustrate why the team size are growing, he isn't saying it's something specific to Tomb Raider.
Yes. But Tomb Raider is an action-adventure game with a lot of fighting and abort avoiding traps in dungeons and so on. AAA games is defined by having bigger budgets and more developers than other games and Tomb Raider is one of the best selling game series with 58 million game copies sold. Today shooters and action games are the main games that are viewed as AAA games because they seem to be very popular and especially among 16-25 yrs old male gamers. Those gamers expect the games to become bigger and more advanced for every new version no they are because otherwise the fans of those games would leave and play another game instead.
So the question is if the Sims games really are AAA games? I doubt it because the Sims games are targeted at a very different group who need them to just be simple and easy. So I don't think that EA is interested in giving the Sims games a bigger budget and more developers just to make the Sims games too big and complicated for their main target group
If the Sims games really had been AAA games than TS4 would have kept the open world and the more advanced tools from TS3 and it would have gotten even bigger open world and even more advanced and detailed build tools. The expansions would also have become even bigger EPs instead of SPs and smaller GPs. If all this had been the case then I would have agreed that TS4 likely would have required more developers than TS3 did. But now the opposite seems to be the case.
I think that I saw one of the first Tomb Raider games years ago and I seem to remember that there also was another very similar game series. But the problem in such games is that the fighting isn't very varied. So to make them more interesting they have to add more complicated animation and puzzles and I think that this is exactly what they have done in the newer games. Their problem also is that there are much more competition between such games while the Sims games don't have any competion at all. Therefore the Sims games don't need such high budgets or as many developers.
That's not specific to a target group. Here's the team size for Mario :
A quick look at TS4 credits will show that there's indeed a lot of developpers in the team. Your speculations about a simplified game or a smaller team just don't match with the facts. And you have brought no proof at all, you just say "it seems to be the case" without any evidence and draw conclusions from that, but take a look at the credits, take a look at the game code, take a look at what game devs are saying about the industry and you'll see that your speculations aren't accurate.
The main reason Toddlers were released for free was because not everybody buys every game pack, and the game wouldn't work without them because they brought so many changes to the standard Sims' lives - unlike Vampires, which are independent life-states. So EVERYBODY has to have them. They intended to make their money back with packs like Kids' Room (which sky-rocketed in popularity post-toddlers), Parenthood, and Toddler Stuff.
I consider Toddlers as being about the size of a Game Pack, and believe that EA decided at the end of the first year of Sims 4 to put them in, and that was when development began on them.
Prepping a list of mods to add after Infants are placed into the game. Because real life isn't 'nice'.
Hopefully there will be even more packs with toddler content in the future !
I see no reason why not, since they're base game.
Well, we got quite a lot of family-themed content this late, so they may want to change a bit. I'd really like a pack about active school with a kindergarten, but I don't see it coming that close to Parenthood.
The main reason Toddlers were released for free was because not everybody buys every game pack, and the game wouldn't work without them because they brought so many changes to the standard Sims' lives - unlike Vampires, which are independent life-states. So EVERYBODY has to have them. They intended to make their money back with packs like Kids' Room (which sky-rocketed in popularity post-toddlers), Parenthood, and Toddler Stuff.
I consider Toddlers as being about the size of a Game Pack, and believe that EA decided at the end of the first year of Sims 4 to put them in, and that was when development began on them.
The main (and only) reason toddlers were released for free was because EA darn well realized that was the right thing to do. They could have made big money with that one (especially considering their quality), but they knew they’d lose every bit of goodwill if they would have done that. Toddlers were in the code from the very beginning, because initially they were meant to be in there, like they should have.
The main reason Toddlers were released for free was because not everybody buys every game pack, and the game wouldn't work without them because they brought so many changes to the standard Sims' lives - unlike Vampires, which are independent life-states. So EVERYBODY has to have them. They intended to make their money back with packs like Kids' Room (which sky-rocketed in popularity post-toddlers), Parenthood, and Toddler Stuff.
I consider Toddlers as being about the size of a Game Pack, and believe that EA decided at the end of the first year of Sims 4 to put them in, and that was when development began on them.
The main (and only) reason toddlers were released for free was because EA darn well realized that was the right thing to do. They could have made big money with that one (especially considering their quality), but they knew they’d lose every bit of goodwill if they would have done that. Toddlers were in the code from the very beginning, because initially they were meant to be in there, like they should have.
No, actually. Toddlers were released in a patch rather than an EP or a GP because with how the game is built and designed, a new lifestage has to be added via base game. This does not include a whole new life form like pets for example, but with another human form it has to be done through base, otherwise said human form would have to be tied to the DLC that introduced them. That's why in TS2 young adult stage was only available if you decided to go to university - people liked it so much and complained they wanted to play as YAs outside of it too EA took notes and included this lifestage in the base of TS3. If toddlers came with some sort of a DLC they'd have to be tied to a certain world, or they'd come with extremely limited gameplay features (for everybody who's gonna say "but vampires came with a GP and they're not tied to that one pack" - vampires are just a re-skin of the existing lifestages, and thus they work as an DLC addition. If EA decided to add pre teens for example, unless they'd be a re-skin of children, they'd have to patch them in for free. And that's why it's not likely we'll ever get pre teens for TS4)
They simply had no choice and I'm sure this choice was not made last minute. It became clear what they had to do the moment Frank Gibeau decided to scrap the initial version of the game and the team switched to developing it as offline.
That's not specific to a target group. Here's the team size for Mario :
A quick look at TS4 credits will show that there's indeed a lot of developpers in the team. Your speculations about a simplified game or a smaller team just don't match with the facts. And you have brought no proof at all, you just say "it seems to be the case" without any evidence and draw conclusions from that, but take a look at the credits, take a look at the game code, take a look at what game devs are saying about the industry and you'll see that your speculations aren't accurate.
Your earlier statements were about AAA games which clearly have bigger teams and bigger budgets because this is a definition of an AAA game and as I wrote they are mainly action games targeted at hardcore 16-25 yrs old gamers who only buy them if they are better, bigger and more advanced than all the other similar games.
I don't play Mario games. So I have no knowledge about them becoming bigger too.
The credit lists for each Sims 4 game also don't tell us much because of the new structure at Maxis where they apparently move the developers much more around than earlier. So there are likely developers mentioned in those lists who mainly worked at something else but also worked just a little on the expansion where they are listed in the credit list too.
For me it isn't about proving anything. You haven't. But this isn't the point. EA closed down other Maxis studios because they weren't needed anymore when EA now doesn't want to focus much on big EPs anymore because cheap fast-to-make SPs seems to sell much better. To our knowledge EA hasn't expanded the number of employees in the Redwood studio either. Some developers have left while other have been hired to replace them. But we don't know more than this. Only that the Redwood studio also is developing the Sims Mobile and likely also the Sims 5 at the same time as they make a lot of Sims 4 expansions and free updates too. So we know that they have many more teams than earlier. But nothing points in the direction that they have more developers anyway. You are welcome if you somehow can prove this to be the case anyway. But stop referring to the game code and modders who don't know anything about the number of developers either because such information sure isn't in the game code at all.
Comments
This is a popular assumption. But it is very unlikely to be true because earlier Maxis (or the studio in Salt Lake City) had no problem about letting the same team release 2 EPs each year. The executive producer for TS2 even told us that they only had used 3 months to make a just released EP. So I don't buy the assumption that a full team now suddenly has become so unscilled that it cant make an EP in less than a year. The problem is though that there is nothing stopping a game designer from designing the next EP while the rest of the team is still working on the previous one. So if this design time is included then it is correct that it can take a full year. But I still think that the main reason that EA now only has released one EP each year is that the team who made the previous EP had to make a GP and maybe a SP too before they really could start working on the next EP.
I agree that stuff seem to sell much better in SPs than in the Store. So I am quite sure that this also is the reason why EA now mainly focus on SPs instead. But only if we include the SPs and not the Store we can still say that TS4 gets expansions for about the same amount of money each year as TS3 did.
GTW was absolutely being developed before TS4 released, so was Outdoor Retreat, and the Luxury Party SP. The fact that they released the second EP around 6 months after GTW tells me it was probably started before GTW came out.
I still don't understand what people think make TS4 so huge and complicated that the EPs now should take 2 or even 3 times as long time to develop compared to the EPs for TS2 and TS3? Do you really think that TS4 is a that much bigger game?
Because it has been said by Maxis devs, because it's a phenomenon that isn't specific to Maxis but is widespread in the whole AAA industry and confirmed by other game devs and because modders can go and check themselves. Why do you think making an EP in 2017 hasn't changed compared to 2005 ? What proof do you have ?
I don't disagree that things change. But the purpose of new development tools sure isn't to make everything into taking 2 to 4 times as long time such that the development cost for each EP can become much bigger and EA's profit therefore go down. I can believe that the new structure makes it possible to much more easily move developers between teams such that each developer can be utilized more efficiently. But unless EA for some mysterious reason should want costs to increase instead of going down this just means that the expansions are developed by often changing teams that in average are much smaller than the more fixed teams that EA earlier used.
Also we know that EA closed the Salt Lake studio down because EA didn't think that this studio was needed anymore and most likely because making the Sims 4 expansions doesn't need as many devs working on them as the Sims 3 expansions did. I can easily understand that too because SPs don't need much programming and can be made by very small teams that mainly consists of almost only artists.
You won't find something similar for other games. An example is sports games that become bigger and bigger for each new version. But a new version is still released every year anyway.
Toddlers were obviously never planned to be released for TS4 at all. Otherwise they would have been in the basegame or at least planned to be included in some EP and not to be released 2 yrs later in a free update after a lot of fuss about them all over the internet - and something that only can have hurt the sales numbers quite much in those 2 yrs. So EA just finally realized that the missing toddlers had hurt the sales numbers unacceptably much and therefore saw no other thing to do except suddenly telling the devs to make them anyway and to release them for free to stop all the fuss about them.
An example that suggests the opposite is if we compare with a very old game like M1 Tank Platoon which was released by Microprose in 1989 for Atari ST, Amiga and MS-DOS. To make it possible for us to control 4 advanced tanks and support units and still make it possible to let the game be played from a diskette drive they had to program everything in assembler which is a very low level as a programming language and therefore a huge work. But today programmers instead use huge automatic code generating tools which make the work many times smaller. It also makes the finished program slower and about 10 times as big. But with current hardware who cares?
Huge games are still made by studios who often only has about 60 developers. The Sims Freeplay is just an example and Firemonkeys are able to make other games too and releasing new stuff for Freeplay every week. We don't know the total number of developers in Maxis. But we know that Maxis makes more games at the same time than ever before and therefore likely now use much smaller development teams as EA seems to have reduced the size of Maxis instead of increasing it.
The way I personally see it - without any evidence - is that you're probably right that toddlers weren't a fixed plan from the start. I think they toyed with the idea (which I see as the cause of a couple of confusing and later on upsetting statements simmers got) but didn't manage or didn't want to, or simply couldn't finish it. And I also think you're right that someone somewhere must have realised that this one in particular, more than anything else, created a huge rift between developers and simmers that no content, no matter how awesome, would have all that easily fixed. Sure, some people didn't care, some enjoyed it regardless, some hate toddlers, etc. etc., but it's hard to deny just how much coverage and bad press their omission in particular got. It's hard to deny that it was responsible for a lot of the tension we've had on these forums. So I agree: had this not happened, if more people really and honestly hadn't cared or thought it was a big deal or eve symptomatic of a larger problem, I don't think we'd have them today. I don't see, like you say, why they'd spend development budget on a feature no one's missing anyway - or just so barely, it's hardly noticeable (in, among other things, sales and customer satisfaction).
But I do believe that toddlers took longer to make than we might realise. Because multitasking is a difficult system to work around. Sure the open world had issues, but a lot of them were about too much stuff randomly spawning and getting stuck for no good reason and a good cleaner could reduce a lot of the issues this caused. How do you "clean up" multitasking? It's pretty much the basis of this entire game - it's why it's a feature that matters so much to simmers who like and dislike it alike. Multitasking is primarily responsible for the "all they do is talk talk talk" phenomenon that angers so many, and it was a lot worse when there was still less to do in this game. But the fact that your sim can walk up to any sim and have a chat while drinking coffee, reading a book, watching tv, playing stuff (except for some reason when using the bowling alley ... uch), or have coffee and food at the same time in one cue, swim and still interact with others, etc. etc. creates a kind of fluidity that is rather unique to the sims - and it is promising. I'm relatively sure we'll see it again in TS5 - and yes, I think it will work much better. In a sense, TS4 must've showed them the limits & the difficulties with this idea.
And again: you can see this best when you look at toddlers. How does a sim hold a glass of water and go get a toddler who's himself holding a tablet to then put it on the highchair while both are technically still able to have a chat? How do you prevent sims and toddlers cuing up lots of contradictory (albeit multitasking-capable) tasks & if you can't, how do you know which one to prioritise? I think the coding behind that is actually pretty fascinating .. just what I think. I can't prove it, but I can only imagine the difficulty in making this the main basis of your new sims game, then adding more and more and more and more content to it, without this system collapsing in on itself. We can see its cracks already, we know when and how it doesn't work. And for toddlers, it often just doesn't exist at all. How does the game prioritise the toddler? By nearly always prioritising the toddler, even the toddler's very own actions. Anyway lots of blabla just to say that I think we shouldn't underestimate this system as much as some like to do. We should realise that it creates difficulties (which are sure as hell going to pop up again with pets) that we didn't have in older games - not like this. And that might also explain why toddlers came so incredibly incredibly late
I admit that the toddlers were amazing when they finally were released. But this again just shows to me that EA was desperate. The sales numbers must have been very disappointing and EA therefore likely couldn't imagine any other way to improve them except releasing the most impressing toddlers for free.
I think that EA learned from this and most likely regretted to have simplified babies and teens too. So I therefore think that EA won't do any of those things for TS5 because EA now knows how extremely important babies, toddlers and teens are to so very many simmers.
I never considered graphics and art style for one second when I started playing Sims 3 by the way, but it has become increasingly important over the years. I must add only after Sims 4 was announced and presented, I started realizing how much I love and appreciate Sims 3's art style and approach (which doesn't mean I think it's perfect btw, far from it). That simply is a matter of preference. I'd love a stylized though realistic art style for this franchise, in graphics, CAS and animations. I regret there is no escaping to what I call the silliness in Sims 4 (I don't mean that in an objective way, it's how it feels for me, every second I'm in the game).
The growing team size is something that is well documented on the web and confirmed by game devs actually working in those teams, not just mere speculation from people interested in the subject. For example : http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/133139530182/what-caused-the-massive-increase-in-team-size-for
And your assembler example shows it actually : we may have more efficient tool for a specific task, but we are no longer making games with a couple of units. Expectations are growing, and the workload too.
This game dev is taking Lara Croft as an example to illustrate why the team size are growing, he isn't saying it's something specific to Tomb Raider.
So the question is if the Sims games really are AAA games? I doubt it because the Sims games are targeted at a very different group who need them to just be simple and easy. So I don't think that EA is interested in giving the Sims games a bigger budget and more developers just to make the Sims games too big and complicated for their main target group
If the Sims games really had been AAA games than TS4 would have kept the open world and the more advanced tools from TS3 and it would have gotten even bigger open world and even more advanced and detailed build tools. The expansions would also have become even bigger EPs instead of SPs and smaller GPs. If all this had been the case then I would have agreed that TS4 likely would have required more developers than TS3 did. But now the opposite seems to be the case.
I think that I saw one of the first Tomb Raider games years ago and I seem to remember that there also was another very similar game series. But the problem in such games is that the fighting isn't very varied. So to make them more interesting they have to add more complicated animation and puzzles and I think that this is exactly what they have done in the newer games. Their problem also is that there are much more competition between such games while the Sims games don't have any competion at all. Therefore the Sims games don't need such high budgets or as many developers.
A quick look at TS4 credits will show that there's indeed a lot of developpers in the team. Your speculations about a simplified game or a smaller team just don't match with the facts. And you have brought no proof at all, you just say "it seems to be the case" without any evidence and draw conclusions from that, but take a look at the credits, take a look at the game code, take a look at what game devs are saying about the industry and you'll see that your speculations aren't accurate.
I consider Toddlers as being about the size of a Game Pack, and believe that EA decided at the end of the first year of Sims 4 to put them in, and that was when development began on them.
I see no reason why not, since they're base game.
Well, we got quite a lot of family-themed content this late, so they may want to change a bit. I'd really like a pack about active school with a kindergarten, but I don't see it coming that close to Parenthood.
No, actually. Toddlers were released in a patch rather than an EP or a GP because with how the game is built and designed, a new lifestage has to be added via base game. This does not include a whole new life form like pets for example, but with another human form it has to be done through base, otherwise said human form would have to be tied to the DLC that introduced them. That's why in TS2 young adult stage was only available if you decided to go to university - people liked it so much and complained they wanted to play as YAs outside of it too EA took notes and included this lifestage in the base of TS3. If toddlers came with some sort of a DLC they'd have to be tied to a certain world, or they'd come with extremely limited gameplay features (for everybody who's gonna say "but vampires came with a GP and they're not tied to that one pack" - vampires are just a re-skin of the existing lifestages, and thus they work as an DLC addition. If EA decided to add pre teens for example, unless they'd be a re-skin of children, they'd have to patch them in for free. And that's why it's not likely we'll ever get pre teens for TS4)
They simply had no choice and I'm sure this choice was not made last minute. It became clear what they had to do the moment Frank Gibeau decided to scrap the initial version of the game and the team switched to developing it as offline.
I don't play Mario games. So I have no knowledge about them becoming bigger too.
The credit lists for each Sims 4 game also don't tell us much because of the new structure at Maxis where they apparently move the developers much more around than earlier. So there are likely developers mentioned in those lists who mainly worked at something else but also worked just a little on the expansion where they are listed in the credit list too.
For me it isn't about proving anything. You haven't. But this isn't the point. EA closed down other Maxis studios because they weren't needed anymore when EA now doesn't want to focus much on big EPs anymore because cheap fast-to-make SPs seems to sell much better. To our knowledge EA hasn't expanded the number of employees in the Redwood studio either. Some developers have left while other have been hired to replace them. But we don't know more than this. Only that the Redwood studio also is developing the Sims Mobile and likely also the Sims 5 at the same time as they make a lot of Sims 4 expansions and free updates too. So we know that they have many more teams than earlier. But nothing points in the direction that they have more developers anyway. You are welcome if you somehow can prove this to be the case anyway. But stop referring to the game code and modders who don't know anything about the number of developers either because such information sure isn't in the game code at all.