Following its Game of the Year win at last year’s Game Awards, Astro Bot just took home another award, this time for having a director that’s saying exactly what the video game industry needs to hear right now. Yes, I made up the award.
Speaking during a Game Developers Conference panel that GamesRadar+ attended, Team Asobi studio head Nicolas Doucet said the goal at the outset of making Astro Bot was to make a game that could be finished in a reasonable amount of time.
“From the start, we were in the mindset that it’s OK to make a compact game … it’s OK to make a small game,” said Doucet. “So for us, it means that we’re making something of such scale that we can control it fully. That’s from a development standpoint. But not only that. For the players, we all know that players today have a backlog of games and cannot complete their games, so the prospect of a game you can actually complete is a really persuasive argument.”
Persuasive, indeed. Doucet is so persuasive that I think I’ll go ahead and do another Astro Bot run instead of playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows. That’s not true, but the point is, there are too many Assassin’s Creed Shadows-sized games, and I’m at the point where I’m begging for mercy. My backlog can’t take another massive RPG – it’ll crumble under its own mighty weight.
Anyway, yes, please make more small games, people. Even if my personal pleas are falling on unsympathetic ears, remember that Astro Bot is a small game, and it won Game of the Year. You can do it too.
Team Asobi’s gigantic 2024 proves it’s time to free Astro Bot from PlayStation’s past.
