FromSoftware has positioned itself as one of the best developers currently working in the games industry at the moment, pumping out genre-defining titles like Elden Ring, the Dark Souls series, and the upcoming Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. You'd think with that much sway and a bevy of masterpieces under its belt that FromSoftware's development team would be huge, but it's actually shockingly small compared others devs working on triple-A titles.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Armored Core 6 producer Yasunori Ogura reveals that FromSoftware is only made up of roughly 400 developers, with 300 of those on the development team. Instead of hiring different teams to work on different projects, Ogura explains that FromSoftware chooses to shift developers around depending on where they're needed, even if that means swapping projects entirely.
"To give a broad image, we have just about 400 employees at FromSoftware, and about 300 of those are development staff," says Ogura. "That pool of development staff is shifted around, moved between projects as needed, depending on the current situation with a project and the current period of development."
"At peak times, you'd have up to 200, 230 developers working on Armored Core 6. This was similar to Elden Ring as well. At the peak period of that project, you'd have a similar number of staff working on it simultaneously. So staff is moved around fluidly as and when needed."
Compared to the rest of the triple-A gaming industry, having only 230 developers working on a game as massive and life-consuming as Elden Ring is absolutely wild, especially when you consider Armored Core 6 was well into development at the same time. With only 300 developers working on both Elden Ring and Armored Core 6 simultaneously, FromSoftware must be incredibly efficient to get things done with so few delays and so much polish.
However, while it's admirable that a developer can release two high-profile titles like Elden Ring and Armored Core 6 a little over a year apart, you have to worry slightly for the devs considering how much of a problem crunch is within the industry. We've had studios much larger than FromSoftware suffer from harsh working conditions when working on a single game, never mind two at the same time, so hopefully development isn't as intense as it sounds and employees are given the time for a healthy work-life balance.
Now that Armored Core 6 development is in the final stages, it's safe to assume that FromSoftware now has developers working on its next project. The only known title the developer has in the works at the moment in Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, so it's probably going to be all hands on deck as FromSoftware heads back to The Lands Between.