>>718747184
Ish.
The thing is a lot of studios also had a shitload of technical knowledge and institutional skill at play.
This is why Halo ditching custom engines to make the next game in Unreal was such a big deal. Same with Nintendo dabbling in Unreal Engine or them and Konami reviving Survival Kids and directly working with Unity to make the thing. Widely used and known engines can compensate against that.
This is Nintendo's greatest advantage outside of their IP vault. The fact that they have such a ridiculously high retention rate. That everybody that worked on SMB1 in 1985 is still working at Nintendo in some way and was credited on SMB Wonder. That Kenta Motokura, who was designing 3D Mario in the 00s was quickly bumped up to Director, and now even has producer credits under his role overseeing EPD8's new junior team making Donkey Kong Bananza.
The widespread publisher strategy of firing everyone for an easy share price boost was basically a slow-killing cancer that crippled game development in the HD age.

This isn't like
>oh 2 dozen people could make this game in 2003 we could do that now too
Publishers put a lot of money up front to make sure shit was stable. Lots of smaller teams these days have wildly inconsistent funding sources.
For how much Geoff Keighley was on stage back in June jacking off small teams it also ignores how much something like Expedition 33 was dependent on a lot of ready-made market assets and outsourcing that cut down on a lot of labor needs.
>tldr it's basically impossible for big teams to scale down, but it's also difficult for small teams to build momentum due to fucked financing
There's really no one size fits all solution. The best you can hope for
>you have a financial buffer
>the person in charge can manage a project and can see what needs to be done to meet deadlines and ship the game

This is why Rod Fergusson leaving Blizzard to go back to Take Two to unfuck Bioshock again is such a big deal.