Why small games have a big future

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

In each level of Sony’s superb new platformer Astrobot, the titular android is given a unique power. For one challenge, you receive powerful fists on springs. Another grants you the ability to freeze time. But perhaps most delightful is the level where you gain the ability to shrink at will to the size of a mouse, allowing you to squeeze through the bars of a cage, scale the hands of a clock and jump across the petals of a flower.

Astrobot is a game that understands that smaller is often better — and Sony executives should be taking notes. The company has suffered some high-profile blows lately by aiming too big: closing down its expensive shooter Concord after two weeks due to lack of interest and taking flak for the eye-watering price of the newly announced PS5 Pro console. Meanwhile Astrobot, made by a small team of 60 in just three years, is proof that a project of modest scope can result in outsized success. With no pretensions to hyper-realistic graphics or gargantuan open worlds, this polished 3D platformer consistently delivers excellent, surprising gameplay and doesn’t outstay its welcome. It suggests that aiming small can result in better games, and perhaps a healthier industry, too.

The games industry has been sailing through choppy waters in 2024, with more than 10,000 lay-offs so far alongside numerous studio closures and game cancellations. This is partly a correction after overzealous hiring and spending during the pandemic gaming bubble, but it’s also proof that games companies have a bad habit of biting off more than they can chew.

This extends to games themselves, and the assumption that players expect every title to be even bigger and more polished than the last, further increasing the pressure on developers already working unreasonable hours. Graphics, in particular, now require a huge investment of additional resources to achieve even mildly noticeable improvements — gone are the days when they improved in leaps and bounds with each new console generation.

Going bigger can be bad for games. Better graphics and bigger worlds don’t necessarily make them more fun to play. Meanwhile, the more expensive games are, the less willing developers are to take risks. Instead many modern blockbusters are created according to an unfocused “more is more” operating philosophy, and end up feeling bloated and full of meaningless box-ticking. See the latest Assassin’s Creed games or 2023’s Starfield, which spent eight years in development and boasted more than a thousand planets — but offered nothing compelling to do on any of them.

As a significant segment of the audience gets older, many players have fewer hours to dedicate to gaming between childcare or other responsibilities. Gamers often speak in hushed tones about their “backlog” — games they’ve bought but can’t find time to play. It’s revealing that a popular podcast advertises itself with the tagline: “Games that respect your time.”

Luckily, there are plenty of excellent new options for those with less free time. While 2024 has been a barren year for big games compared to last year, this has allowed innovative indie games to take centre stage. We’re in a golden age of small games, facilitated by the increasing accessibility of game-making tools and distribution platforms. So single-developer projects such as Balatro, a fiendishly addictive poker-themed game, and Animal Well, a psychedelic exploration through a mysterious dungeon full of secrets, have both earned feverish fanbases this year.

Meanwhile, indie developers are able to take creative risks rarely seen in the big leagues. Where except on a small scale could you see an epic sci-fi narrative used as a metaphor for contemporary Hong Kong politics (1000xResist), a game about clicking your mouse that comments on sexual compulsion (Clickolding) or an adventure that casts you as a 19th-century Russian nun who is losing her faith (Indika)?

As we approach Christmas, there will be the inevitable run of bigger games, including new entries in the Call of Duty, Indiana Jones and Dragon Age franchises. This is not unwelcome — there will always be a place for high-quality big games that you can get lost in, whether it’s the unfettered escapism of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or the gritty period detail of Red Dead Redemption 2.

But it seems that even the biggest companies are realising the value of going small: over the past year, several have released indie-scale games, many of them excellent, such as Dave the Diver, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and Tales of Kenzera: Zau. They might be starting to realise that the gaming world would be better for all if big games were the exception rather than the expectation. Or, in the words of a popular meme: “I want shorter games with worse graphics and I’m not kidding.”