Team Asobi has been seeing quite a bit of success thanks to its most recent platformer Astro Bot. At Game Developer’s Conference 2025, the studio’s head, Nicolas Doucet, spoke about how the fact that Astro Bot is a smaller scale game than most AAA releases out there benefited the game, and why more studios should be okay with working on smaller-scaled games.
During his GDC talk, Doucet spoke about how the gaming audience in this day and age tends to have several games in its backlogs already. Thanks to the rise of digital distribution over the last decade, as well as steep discounts offered by Steam or Humble Bundle, players tend to buy several games that they don’t immediately rush to finish. This leaves little room for new games that are bigger. Smaller games, however, might have a better chance at capturing audience attention.
Doucet also spoke about the benefit to developers in making smaller games. Since the scope isn’t too wide, developers also have more control over what they’re making and how they go about making it. In this way, making smaller and more compact games benefits both customers as well as developers.
“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, according to GamesRadar. “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.”
To Doucet’s credit, Astro Bot is an incredibly tightly-packed game that, despite having several levels and secrets, should take most players between 12 and 15 hours to finish. Doucet spoke about how there could be more play time to be extracted from Astro Bot thanks to optional stuff, but that was never a priority for Team Asobi.
“It’s a game in which you collect a lot of characters… But that’s never really been the focus,” said Doucet in an interview back in July 2024. “We never said it absolutely has to be 20 to 30 hours of play. We want to really make a game in which the tempo is constant throughout and that each level is the same quality rather than having moments that are actually a little long.”
Astro Bot was released for the PS5 back in September. Since its release, the platforming title has gone on to become incredibly successful in terms of both critical reception as well as sales figures. Thanks to the game having sold more than 1.5 million copies in just a few months since its release, even Sony president Hiroki Totoki spoke about wanting to release more family friendly games.
Aside from our own review (which you can check out here), if you want an example of how well-praised Astro Bot was with critics, the title was the most highly-reviewed game on Metacritic for 2024.
