Game developers come in all shapes and sizes. Indie devs often have teams that are less than a few dozen at max, and some of them only have a handful of people to work with! Then, when you get to the “major developers,” they can have anywhere from 50 to several hundred people working on a single project. The size of the team is often determined by the titles they make, the history they have, and the scale of games they produce. Not everyone needs a big team, after all. In the case of Game Freak, they do have a nicely sized dev team, but it’s about to get even bigger.
If you somehow don’t know, Game Freak are the main developers of the Pokemon franchise. Specifically, they do the main titles along with certain key spinoffs. The Pokemon Company oversees everything, but these developers make the main games you know and love. As noted by Insider Stealth, the company is getting to host a “recruitment event,” one that they’re hoping will bring in a bunch of new people into their squad:
As Stealth notes, the dev team is about 250 strong at max, which is enough for many games and squads, but this one is a bit different for a couple of basic reasons. The biggest one is that Game Freak doesn’t work on one title and then move on, like, say, certain dev teams within Nintendo. Instead, they’re often divided up and working on multiple projects at once. In the past, that wasn’t an issue, as the games they made were still large, but not to the level they are now.
On the Nintendo Switch alone, they handled remakes, new entries and started an all-new spinoff franchise that is gearing up for a sequel within the next year. That’s not even counting the other side projects they did in the meantime.
While Gen 9 was a financial hit, as was the “Legend-ary” spinoff, both titles had serious issues that many fans pointed out. The team is typically known for its high quality in game development, but both big releases had numerous bugs, graphical issues, and so much more.
Many put the blame on The Pokemon Company for rushing these titles out before getting “a true polish,” and that’s a fair thing to note. However, getting Game Freak some more help to ensure that everything is quality is a huge step that everyone should be happy about.
