Hideo Kojima says the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 development team is his ‘ideal’ size: ‘They only have like 33 team members and a dog’

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has an awful lot of fans, and Hideo Kojima is one of them. But the Death Stranding mastermind admires developer Sandfall Interactive not just for the game it made, but also for the way it was made: With a very small core team.

Speaking at an interview in Australia attended by Dexerto (via GamesRadar), Kojima said his own studio, Kojima Productions, has grown over the years. “It was like a team of six” when he first started out, he said, so “you could do everything yourself.” Delegation became necessary as the studio expanded, “but sometimes, the idea doesn’t really work out because it’s a bigger team.”

Sandfall Interactive’s accomplishment—creating a blockbuster hit with a relatively small team—is what really impresses Kojima, and seemingly what he’d like to emulate. “They only have like 33 team members and a dog,” he said. “That’s my ideal when I create something with a team.”

I like small teams too, in all things—any endeavour that involves more than six people, myself included, irritates me by default—but at the same time it’s important to remember, and acknowledge, that Clair Obscur was not made by just those 33 Sandfall Interactive staff members.

As PC Gamer’s Lincoln Carpenter wrote shortly after the Summer Game Fest, when host Geoff Keighley paid tribute to Clair Obscur as a “monumental achievement” made by “a team of under 30 developers,” it’s an inspirational legend but factually wrong: The core team at Sandfall is in the neighborhood of 30 people which is quite small by industry standards, but dozens of others were involved. The credits page on Mobygames says 412 people worked on Clair Obscur, which is a far cry from 33.

Kojima’s comment still holds up: Many of the people listed in the Clair Obscur credits work at external contractors or are voice actors, and so in his ideal world they wouldn’t be wandering around the halls of Kojima Productions causing stress and headaches anyway. And I absolutely meant it when I said I agree with him. As the old saying goes, after all, too many cooks gets on my nerves. But it’s good to remember that sometimes the popular picture of a tiny, scrappy team doing everything itself isn’t the whole picture: It takes a lot of people to make a big game like Clair Obscur or Death Stranding.

As for the team size he actually has to deal with, Kojima said during the interview that he told film director George Miller—they are mutual fans—not long after he founded Kojima Productions that he was trying to keep it under 150 people, a number Miller seems to have approved of. It grew to over 200 people during the Covid-19 pandemic, but Kojima apparently kept that to himself during a subsequent conversation, saying during the interview that he “couldn’t tell that to George.”