PlayStation’s 'Astro Bot' Is a Model for the Video-Game Industry

Hi everyone. Today we’re talking to the director of the critically acclaimed new game Astro Bot, but first...

This week’s top gaming news:

It was an eventful week for Sony Group Corp.’s PlayStation. On Tuesday, the company said it would yank down its online shooter Concord after just 11 days on sale and offer refunds to anyone who bought it. Then, on Thursday, the new PlayStation 5 exclusive Astro Bot received so many rave reviews that it became the best-scoring game of 2024.

The contrast made for some serious whiplash.

Concord was an expensive online shooter developed by hundreds of people at an estimated nine-figure budget, greenlit as part of PlayStation’s effort to chase the Fortnite dragon of “live service” games that can be monetized for years after release. The game received mediocre reviews and was played by almost nobody.

Meanwhile, Astro Bot is now sitting at 94 out of 100 on the review aggregation website Metacritic. It has no microtransactions, live-service elements or cynical trend-chasing. It is simply a great platformer, one that surprises and delights you at every turn with smooth controls and all sorts of brilliant gameplay twists.

I’ve played through most of the game and am absolutely enamored. It’s hard to stop smiling as your adorable little robot bounces and floats his way to rescuing other Astro Bots, many of which are dressed up as characters from PlayStation history, such as Kratos from God of War. (The entire game is full of PlayStation references, and your robots fly around on a ship fashioned after the PS5. At times, it can feel like a little much. But clearly it’s all done with love.)

While Concord feels symbolic of the industry’s woes, Astro Bot feels like a model for a more sustainable future. It was developed by a team of 60 people in three years, a stark contrast to the six-year productions staffed by thousands of employees that have become common in recent times. Rather than chasing endless gameplay, Astro Bot is delightfully compact and can be completed in around a dozen hours — a godsend for busy parents or people with massive gaming backlogs.

In an interview this week, Nicolas Doucet, director of Astro Bot, told me that one of the secrets to the game’s success was his team’s restraint when it came to scope.

“Having something that’s 12 to 15 hours of condensed fun, where there wasn’t five minutes in which you felt it was long or lacking, is much more valuable than 40 hours when you have some moments that you feel like skipping,” Doucet said. “Being able to be OK with that, goes in some way to keeping things under control.”

Doucet, a French game developer who started his career at Lego A/S before moving to Japan for a job at PlayStation, helped start Sony’s Team Asobi studio, the maker of Astro Bot, in 2012. The name, he said, comes from the Japanese word for ‘play,’ because “we wanted to remind ourselves always of the fundamentals of play.”

Team Asobi started off with a series of experimental, augmented-reality and virtual-reality games including 2018’s Astro Bot Rescue Mission, a PlayStation VR title that introduced the eponymous robot and was critically acclaimed for its innovative controls. Afterward, Doucet and his team volunteered to develop Astro’s Playroom, a tie-in game for the PlayStation 5. Although it was more a tech demo than a proper game, fans loved the way it made use of the controller’s unique haptic feedback.

In 2021, buoyed by the positive reaction to their previous titles, the team began slowly expanding and building prototypes for a full-fledged game. Shaping the design of Astro Bot early, Doucet said, was another key to its success — most of the game that you see today has existed for years.

“If you do that early on, you get rid of the most difficult task, which is to bring the fun,” he said. “It goes a long way towards making a smoother production later on.”

Throughout the process, the team behind Astro Bot would get together every two weeks to review their progress and play the game — an act that might seem obvious but is surprisingly uncommon during video-game productions.

“When you have a really big team, sometimes you forget why you’re doing what you’re doing,” Doucet said. “For three years, if your job is to do backgrounds, you’re not sure where those trees are going to go. It can lead to unnecessary work. To be able to always put it in context — why am I doing what I’m doing — is really needed.”

Keeping the Astro Bot team at 60 people rather than swelling into the hundreds resulted in myriad benefits, such as offering all of Team Asobi creative agency and input. At the end of each two-week milestone, everyone on the team was tasked with picking one aspect of the game they liked and one that they wanted to improve — a process that made everyone feel like they were able to contribute.

Astro Bot is brimming with creative ideas and surprises, such as a forest full of singing trees and a mouse-themed level that you can explore by shrinking the robotic protagonist to miniature size and getting an intimate look at mouse holes and apple cores. This creativity was the result of everyone on the team sharing ideas — not just the designers.

“I’m not saying it’s the ultimate democratic team, but I think there’s quite a bit of that. And that contributes to keeping motivation up,” Doucet said. “Ideas come from everywhere on the team. It’s not like game designers have a monopoly of good ideas. It could be audio, visual, technical people. You want to mix it up.”

Combined with collegial chemistry — Doucet told me that a large chunk of his team has been together for a decade — it all adds up to a breakout hit. Astro Bot may not drive billions of dollars in revenue, but because it was only developed by 60 people, its threshold for profitability is relatively low.

In other words, it’s not just a brilliant game. It’s a model for a more sustainable industry, one in which publishers are content with smaller, more cheaply developed games over live-service behemoths that nobody wants to play.

If colorful platformers aren’t your thing, here’s a very different kind of recommendation: the Ace Attorney Investigations collection, which came out today. It’s a compilation of two games in the long-running series, which stars noble lawyers who set out to exonerate wrongfully accused clients and find the truth behind increasingly convoluted murder mysteries. This compilation revolves around prosecutor Miles Edgeworth and includes a game that has never previously been released in English — and is a highlight of the series.

You can reach Jason at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].

Get Tech Daily and more Bloomberg Tech weeklies in your inbox: