Group Asobi has been seeing fairly a little bit of success because of 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 recreation than most AAA releases on the market benefited the sport, and why extra studios must be okay with engaged on smaller-scaled video games.
Throughout his GDC speak, Doucet spoke about how the gaming viewers nowadays 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 are larger. Smaller video games, nonetheless, might need a greater probability at capturing viewers consideration.
Doucet additionally spoke concerning the profit to builders in making smaller video games. For the reason that scope isn’t too vast, builders even have extra management over what they’re making and the way they go about making it. On this means, making smaller and extra compact video games advantages each prospects in addition to builders.
“From the beginning, we have been within the mindset that it’s OK to make a compact recreation… it’s OK to make a small recreation,” stated Doucet, in line with GamesRadar. “So for us, it implies that we’re making one thing of such scale that we are able to management it totally. That’s from a growth standpoint. However not solely that. For the gamers, everyone knows that gamers right now have a backlog of video games and can’t full their video games, so the prospect of a recreation you may really full is a extremely persuasive argument.”
To Doucet’s credit score, Astro Bot is an extremely tightly-packed recreation 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 because of non-compulsory stuff, however that was by no means a precedence for Group Asobi.
“It’s a recreation wherein you accumulate quite a lot 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 recreation wherein the tempo is fixed all through and that every degree is similar high quality relatively than having moments which are really slightly lengthy.”
Astro Bot was launched for the PS5 again in September. Since its launch, the platforming title has gone on to change into extremely profitable when it comes to each crucial reception in addition to gross sales figures. Due to the sport having offered greater than 1.5 million copies in only a few months since its launch, even Sony president Hiroki Totoki spoke about desirous to launch extra household pleasant video games.
Other than our personal evaluate (which you’ll be able to try right here), in order for you an instance of how well-praised Astro Bot was with critics, the title was probably the most highly-reviewed recreation on Metacritic for 2024.