Hideo Kojima believes Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 devs have the perfect team size with “33 team members and a dog”

Hideo Kojima’s upcoming Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is almost here, bringing a new “polarising” adventure to fans of the Metal Gear Solid creator’s new sequel. While Kojima’s own development team, Kojima Productions, has “ballooned” to over 200 employees, the developer believes smaller teams are the way to go.

Is the team size for Clair Obscur perfect?

Speaking at a Q&A session reported by Dexerto, Kojima explained that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developer Sandfall Interactive’s constrained team size is the perfect size. However, the way in which AAA games are made now makes that size impossible for massive projects.

“They only have like 33 team members and a dog,” Hideo Kojima said during the group discussion. That’s my ideal when I create something with a team.”

“Creation has now become much bigger,” the Death Stranding 2 director continued. “It’s kind of a war between how efficient you could [be] with the small team, but you have to make it so grand.”

Just two decades ago, development teams were nearly all a few dozen workers in size for major releases. However, as games have become much bigger and infinitely more complicated, game teams have exponentially increased. For example, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was developed by around 40 developers. Starfield required over 400, with 250 still working on the game’s post-launch content as of 2023.

It’s also worth noting that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 also required a lot more than just “33 developers and a dog”, although that is the size of the game’s core team. In fact, Expedition 33 used a tonne of outsourcing for animation, motion capture, QA and more meaning the game still had hundreds of developers working on the game.

Nevertheless, it is nice to imagine a world where it would only require a few dozen talented developers to create something as brilliant as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Maybe, one day, we’ll actually get back to that level of efficiency, but it seems unlikely in a world were thousands of developers work on Call of Duty every year.

While Clair Obscur is out and finished, Sandfall Interactive has confirmed more content is on the way for the brilliant RPG. On Kojima’s end, the developer is preparing to work on his two next projects: his horror title OD and the Metal Gear Solid spiritual successor Physint.

About the Author

Lewis White

Lewis White is a veteran games journalist with a decade of experience writing news, reviews, features and investigative pieces about game development with a focus on Halo and Xbox.