Group Asobi has been seeing fairly a little bit of success due to its most up-to-date platformer Astro Bot. At Recreation Developer’s Convention 2025, the studio’s head, Nicolas Doucet, spoke about how the truth that Astro Bot is a smaller scale sport than most AAA releases on the market benefited the sport, and why extra studios needs to be okay with engaged on smaller-scaled video games.
Throughout his GDC speak, Doucet spoke about how the gaming viewers at the moment tends to have a number of video games in its backlogs already. Due to the rise of digital distribution over the past decade, in addition to steep reductions provided by Steam or Humble Bundle, gamers have a tendency to purchase a number of video games that they don’t instantly rush to complete. This leaves little room for brand new video games which might be greater. Smaller video games, nonetheless, might need a greater probability at capturing viewers consideration.
Doucet additionally spoke in regards to the profit to builders in making smaller video games. Because the scope isn’t too broad, builders even have extra management over what they’re making and the way they go about making it. On this approach, making smaller and extra compact video games advantages each clients in addition to builders.
“From the beginning, we had been within the mindset that it’s OK to make a compact sport… it’s OK to make a small sport,” stated Doucet, in accordance with GamesRadar. “So for us, it signifies that we’re making one thing of such scale that we are able to management it absolutely. That’s from a improvement standpoint. However not solely that. For the gamers, everyone knows that gamers in the present day have a backlog of video games and can’t full their video games, so the prospect of a sport you may really full is a very persuasive argument.”
To Doucet’s credit score, Astro Bot is an extremely tightly-packed sport that, regardless of having a number of ranges and secrets and techniques, ought to take most gamers between 12 and 15 hours to complete. Doucet spoke about how there could possibly be extra play time to be extracted from Astro Bot due to non-compulsory stuff, however that was by no means a precedence for Group Asobi.
“It’s a sport during which you accumulate a variety of characters… However that’s by no means actually been the main focus,” stated Doucet in an interview again in July 2024. “We by no means stated it completely needs to be 20 to 30 hours of play. We need to actually make a sport during which the tempo is fixed all through and that every stage is identical high quality fairly than having moments which might be really slightly lengthy.”
Astro Bot was launched for the PS5 again in September. Since its launch, the platforming title has gone on to grow to be extremely profitable by way of each essential reception in addition to gross sales figures. Due to the sport having bought greater than 1.5 million copies in just some months since its launch, even Sony president Hiroki Totoki spoke about eager to launch extra household pleasant video games.
Other than our personal overview (which you’ll be able to try right here), if you’d like an instance of how well-praised Astro Bot was with critics, the title was essentially the most highly-reviewed sport on Metacritic for 2024.
