While Astro Bot has been incredibly successful both in terms of sales figures as well as critical reception, the road to making the game was more challenging. Speaking at GDC 2025 (as caught by GamesRadar), game director Nicolas Doucet said that Team Asobi went through 23 different iterations of the game that would eventually go on to become Astro Bot.
“The original pitch for Astro Bot was written in May, 2021, so, a few months after we began prototyping the game,” said Doucet. “We went through 23 iterations before it was shown to the top management.”
While there were quite a few ideas thrown around with plenty of experimentation, according to Doucet, the final game ended up being close to what the studio had originally pitched to Sony. Doucet said, “generally speaking, we delivered the game quite close to the original pitch.”
Among the various prototypes for Astro Bot, Doucet also spoke about how terms like “happy gameplay,” “techno magic,” and “overflowing charm,” were used to present Astro Bot to PlayStation’s executives. However, the original pitch would end up giving Astro Bot a darker ending than what we ultimately got.
“So, at the end of the game, Astro sacrificed himself for the team, and as the credits roll, we wanted to make a very grieving moment of rebuilding Astro,” Doucet continued, which would require the idea of a “completely dismembered Astro, so you gained the torso without the head.”
Executives seemingly didn’t enjoy the more grim ending to the game. According to Doucet, “some people [were] really upset in the team, for good reasons.”
Ultimately, however, the game went with a “lighter approach with humour, where the player will replace all the parts, and it still conveys the right emotions. The head is always on Astro’s body.”
In a previous talk during GDC 2025, Doucet has also spoken about how it’s okay for studios to make smaller-scaled games. Not only would this be great for the developers, since the scope becomes more manageable, it also ends up being great for players that already have too many games in their backlogs.
“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.”
More recently, Sony unveiled an Astro Bot bundle for the PS5. While not featuring any fancy themes or skins, the bundles includes a copy of Astro Bot alongside the PS5 console. The bundle was unveiled earlier this month.
In the meantime, you can check out more details about Astro Bot through our review of the PS5-exclusive platformer. Also check out the details about its most recent update from back in February.
