Former Valve writer Chet Faliszek has offered a blunt view on one of modern game development's most persistent assumptions: that bigger productions need ever-bigger teams. In a new video addressing why Valve does not simply hire far more people, Faliszek argued that enormous headcounts are rarely the answer to making games better or getting them finished faster.
Faliszek, whose 12 years at Valve included work on Left 4 Dead, believes the industry's drive toward scale can introduce problems that are much harder to solve than a shortage of manpower. His position is not that ambitious games should never employ large groups of developers. Rather, he sees projects on the scale of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 6 as unusual cases, not a model every major studio should try to follow.
"I just think games aren't made to be made by 10,000-person teams," Faliszek said. "These giant teams just don't work."
He acknowledged that a colossal blockbuster can demand an extraordinary number of contributors. For a project carrying the size, expectations, and apparent financial scale associated with GTA 6, he suggested it may take "a gajillion" people to bring everything together. But that level of staffing, in his view, is an exception born from a particular kind of entertainment juggernaut rather than proof that all games benefit from expansion.
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Scale brings costs beyond payroll
Game development is increasingly associated with long production cycles, escalating budgets, and credits that can contain thousands of names. High-end visuals, detailed worlds, animation work, accessibility features, online infrastructure, post-launch support, and broad platform testing all require specialized labor. As studios pursue more technically demanding releases, it can appear logical to add people to every part of the pipeline.
Faliszek's argument is that this logic has limits. More people do not necessarily mean more useful progress. He recalled hearing from an artist at Ubisoft that the company hired only "top artists," yet the number discussed was still around 3,500 people. The anecdote illustrates the tension at the center of his comments: even if a studio fills its ranks with highly skilled professionals, coordinating a workforce of that size is a challenge in itself.
He also connected team growth to the industry's emphasis on graphical fidelity. There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking better-looking games, Faliszek noted, but that pursuit can demand much larger teams. His concern is whether the result always provides enough value for the cost and complexity involved.
That question matters at a time when the business side of games is scrutinizing development spending more closely. A visually extravagant release may be impressive, but its production can become difficult to sustain if it requires an enormous organization and many years of work. Faliszek's perspective does not reject large-scale craftsmanship; it challenges the assumption that fidelity and headcount are the most dependable routes to a stronger game.
Indecision can be more damaging than production work
For Faliszek, delays are often misunderstood as a simple lack of production capacity. A game may have hundreds or thousands of people creating art, writing code, testing systems, recording audio, and building content, but the most expensive lost time can come from decisions being revisited.
"Really, the reason why games take so long is indecision, backtracking," Faliszek said. "Problems like that are the things that really eat up time more than just production."
That distinction is important. Production work has a visible shape: assets are made, levels are assembled, bugs are fixed, and features are implemented. Backtracking is less visible but can affect every department. If the direction changes late, work already completed may need to be revised or discarded. If teams are waiting for approval, or if leadership has not settled on priorities, adding more staff can leave more people blocked by the same uncertainty.
Faliszek pointed to games whose extended paths to release were shaped by changes between developers. Dead Island 2 took close to a decade to arrive after moving among three studios. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 launched 21 years after the original Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, having also passed between two developers. These examples reflect how a project can become prolonged not because people are continuously building the same game for years, but because its development structure, ownership, or direction changes along the way.
There are, of course, many reasons any individual game can be delayed, and neither example reduces to a single issue. Still, they demonstrate the broader point: continuity and clear creative direction can be as important as raw staffing levels. When the core of a project is repeatedly reconsidered, the damage spreads through schedules, technology, content, and team morale.
Left 4 Dead 2 remains Faliszek's key example
Faliszek framed his experience on Left 4 Dead 2 as evidence that a smaller, committed group can deliver a game with lasting impact. He said the sequel was made by 45 people and argued that multiplying that number tenfold would not necessarily have improved it.
"We made Left 4 Dead 2 with 45 people. I don't think it would have been a better game if we would have made it with 450 people," Faliszek said.
The point is not that every game can be made by a team of 45. Development requirements vary enormously by genre, scope, technology, and intended audience. But Left 4 Dead 2 demonstrates the advantage of a well-defined concept supported by a team that can communicate quickly and remain aligned. Its cooperative structure, campaign design, replayability, and AI-driven director system did not depend on building the largest possible organization.
Faliszek's comments suggest that teams should be sized around the work rather than around an industry expectation of constant growth. A project needs enough people to execute its goals, but creating extra layers of management, handoffs, and approvals can dilute accountability. In that environment, individual contributors may have less visibility into the decisions affecting their work, while leaders receive information later and in more fragmented form.
Collaboration, proximity, and remote work
Faliszek also expressed skepticism about remote work as a default model for large game teams. He described remote communication as a "whisper network," where information can be passed along unevenly instead of being shared directly with everyone who needs it. In his assessment, this setup can foster frustration when people feel unheard or are forced to work downstream from choices they had little chance to influence.
His concern is not merely logistical. He believes distance can allow ego and miscommunication to complicate the creative process. Developers may receive partial context, interpret priorities differently, or hear about a decision only after it has affected their own tasks. Those issues can happen in an office as well, especially in very large companies, but Faliszek sees proximity as one way to reduce the friction.
He emphasized the value of people being in the same room, while also allowing for a less literal interpretation: being connected through a shared meeting space can help, too. The central issue is not a particular software platform. It is whether the people making the game can have direct, timely conversations and maintain a common understanding of what they are building.
That is a more nuanced standard than simply requiring everyone to be physically present. The challenge for any studio is to preserve clarity and trust, whether its staff works together in person, remotely, or in a hybrid arrangement. Faliszek's remarks underline how difficult that becomes when an organization is exceptionally large and its decisions pass through many layers.
Valve's size is part of the debate
The question that prompted Faliszek's discussion was specifically about Valve: why the company does not dramatically increase its hiring. Valve is frequently associated with a relatively small workforce compared with the reach of games and services such as Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, and Steam. To outsiders, that can make the company's scale seem counterintuitive. Its products influence a huge part of the PC gaming market, yet it has not built the kind of sprawling development machine commonly attached to the biggest publishers.
Faliszek's answer is that growth alone would not solve the underlying creative and organizational questions. He even said Valve had encountered forms of bloat when its focus leaned heavily toward graphics and fidelity. For him, the calculation comes down to whether additional people materially improve the game or simply make its creation more expensive and less decisive.
The former Valve writer's view will not settle the industry-wide debate over team size. Major games are more complicated than ever, and some productions plainly do require vast groups of specialists. But his comments offer a useful counterweight to the belief that a studio's ambitions must always be matched by an expanding headcount.
In Faliszek's view, the better measure is not how many people a game has behind it. It is whether those people can make decisions, communicate clearly, and deliver something with enough impact to justify the work. For all the appeal of bigger worlds and larger budgets, he argues that a focused team with a shared direction may still be the more effective way to make games.
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