On with that, then what games have the biggest delta between ease of prototyping versus ease of going into full production?
The games with extremely large scope tend to be the ones that have the hardest time to go from prototyping to full production. This is primarily because there's just so much content and so many features and systems to build out even after prototyping. It provides a new challenge - scaling the size of the team up in order to build all of that new content.
Think about games like Grand Theft Auto, Elder Scrolls, the Witcher 3, or even the recent Crimson Desert. If we were building a prototype for the various game systems, it wouldn't be too difficult. If we were building out a single area to prove that the gameplay would work, even that wouldn't be too difficult. But then you actually have to build out the rest of the game. Now, instead of just one single area, you need a thousand. Instead of three quests, you need three thousand. Instead of one set of equipment for the vertical slice, you need a hundred for the final game.
There's an enormous amount of content that must be planned, scoped, and built. There's an enormous amount of work that must be done, which necessitates increasing the number of developers working on the game. This also means the team needs producers to keep those developers tasked and working towards the proper goals, and so on and so forth. Scaling up a team like that is a whole different kind of challenge with a whole different type of difficulty.
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