Sonic lead: AAA studios could learn from indies

Sonic the Hedgehog producer Takashi Iizuka says big-budget game makers could learn from indie developers, and he compared that lesson to how major movie studios might study this summer's surprise hits Backrooms and Obsession. Sonic Pico Park, a spin-off revealed at Summer Game Fest and made by the developers behind Pico Park, swaps the Blue Blur's usual high-speed platforming for cooperative puzzles.

Iizuka, speaking via a translator, noted that making large titles requires "a lot of time, a lot of money," and after such investment a studio needs to sell many units to survive. Indie teams, he added, can generate an idea and then "very quickly" execute it before "moving forward and making more stuff." He called it "really stimulating working with those indie developers, because you get to feel that that smaller team energy and that quickness of working to get an idea into an experience." He drew a parallel with the movie industry, where expensive studio bets can be outperformed at the box office by smaller creative efforts.

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