What do you think? Is it still possible for one man (or a very very small group) to write a commercial quality game these days? Any examples?
This widely depends on how you define ‘commercial quality’.
I think low-budget titles are possible in any case, a AAA title is not.
http://www.cdvspiel.de/ is commercial quality and done by a small team.
http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/
http://www.dexterity.com/
http://www.garagegames.com/
To name but three. And there’s links all over their forums from tiny indy companies. There seems to be a big revival in the games industry going on, the likes of which the music and cinema industries are finding much more difficult to do. Retro is in too, which is nice, for people who don’t want to spend $50 in a game and then invest half their life playing it.
And then of course there’s me, struggling away with sprites elsewhere in the forum…
Cas 
An excellent massively multiplayer flight simulator was written by a small group (3 or 4) of programmers.
You are kidding, right? HiTechCreations is a spinoff of a not-so-small company that produced WarBirds for many years (and still does).
3-4 people still is a bit more than a single-person (about 3-4 times!).
Dale “Hitech” Addink
Doug “Pyro” Balmos
JoAnn “Yankee” Colcleasure
John “Superfly” Guytan
Nathan “Natedog” Mathieu
Roy “Skuzzy” Neese
Veronica “Ronni” Newman
3-4? I count 7! They never started from scratch and - AcesHigh isn’t a killer game…
Well, if you outsource graphics and sound and if the idea is nice, a one good one man game should be possible.
Have a look at http://www.snood.com for example: It looks quite simple and could have been a one man job, graphics are not great, but as far as I know tons of people are playing snood like hell!
Maybe it’s not that title that hit the cover page of all game magazines, but you can make some money with it.
Slashdot had nearly the same story, look here:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/18/1452229&mode=thread&tid=127
It all depends what you consider “commercial quality”.
If its quake, warcraft biggie type of game, Id say no.
but if its a fun game with great playability and very successful
in terms of amount of people playing it ( and indirectly the amount
of revenue you get from selling it) then yes.
Look at Cas’ game for example. Granted he’s put in a lot of effort
and time, however he did basically by himself and a graphics artist.
mobile games are also a great market to pursue some small indie
developments. However, looking at the rapid speed of mobile
device enhancements, quake-like standard games will be
flooding the markets very soon.
Can one man write a high quality game anymore? Without question. Can one man write a commercially successful game? I’m not so sure. The amount of time and money that has to go into marketing of a game in today’s industry is phenomenal. How one man could be heard above the noise that is EA, Sony and others, I don’t know. I think indy projects will continue to produce some amazing orignal games, with a very small (relative) cult following. And that’s not a bad thing.
[quote]http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/
http://www.dexterity.com/
http://www.garagegames.com/
To name but three. And there’s links all over their forums from tiny indy companies. There seems to be a big revival in the games industry going on, the likes of which the music and cinema industries are finding much more difficult to do.
[/quote]
Sounds good.
Probably the following URL is also worth a look-at: http://www.realonearcade.com . I’ve to add however that I don’t like Realnetworks because their Realplayer’s been hidden spyware some time agao, also the strange installer of Realonearcade forces you as customer to install a closed DRM software which does what it wants to (I can’t be bothered to use it).
Anways, it’s said that their absolute top seller (a breakout game if I remember correctly) has been very successful.
I would say two persons can write a good game. The advantage is, that you can discuss your problems and this can be very effective. (Like extreme programming).
Then you need a third person for marketing, sales etc… (or much more ?) Because if you can make a good game you dont sell it because nobody knows it. But if you invest to much in marketing then you cannot write good games in time…
Raven
Maybe a better question would be:
“Can 30 people make a good game”?
At some point, the more people you have, the less innovation you will get. Today’s game development teams are getting bigger and bigger, and this may be related to how the games are getting more and more the same.
Perhaps with the increase in outsourcing, the core game teams will start to shrink again, and we’ll see some more innovation going on.
Personally, I think a good game needs at least two people, because it’s too easy for one person by themself to get tunnel vision. Two people keeps it more sane. Plus, it’s easy for one person to get discouraged.
A great game only requires one person.
A great production requires more.
Cas
[quote]A great game only requires one person.
A great production requires more.
Cas
[/quote]
Along with a marketing and legal division. Wow, gaming’s about to turn into the music industry. :o
http://runescape.com ( http://jagex.com )
A small team made that in Java - and it’s BIG. There are hundreds of thousands of players…I would LOVE to see a better Java-applet-based game.
Isn’t runescape another one of the cases like NeoPets. Lots of people go on and have ago, but don’t carry on playing. So the stats for the number of players reported is false simply because no body bothers cancelling their account.
From what I remember from playing it was a cool game but didn’t catch the imagination because you were too busy trying to grasp the controls.
Kev
There are indeed heaps of players playing that game.
After I made it past the looooong tutorial, I noticed that the entire world was cramped full with high-level powergamers. In fact, it felt a bit like Ultima Online in that sense.
I think what makes Runescape so popular is that playing an applet isn’t considered REALLY playing a game.
'cause it sure ain’t the graphics. 
[edit: And not playing a game is good because you can do it when you’re supposed to be doing other things… like homework or printing the silly documents your boss wanted an hour ago]
[quote]Isn’t runescape another one of the cases like NeoPets. Lots of people go on and have ago, but don’t carry on playing. So the stats for the number of players reported is false simply because no body bothers cancelling their account.
From what I remember from playing it was a cool game but didn’t catch the imagination because you were too busy trying to grasp the controls.
Kev
[/quote]
No. They have 18 worlds, each with usually 500-1200 people in each.
From JAGeX:
Jagex has a large audience of over 240,000 individuals who play the game every month. Our audience is made up of a wide age range from 8 to 50 years olds.
I stand (sit) corrected.
Kev
Sure. There is no reason why a commercial quality game couldn’t be written by one person provided that one person had all of the skills necessary (art, sound, progamming, etc). There is nothing stopping one person from putting together a design document and writing some code and licensing some art/music for a game. It would take a long time for most people and a single person is likely to get distracted and go off and do other things - but there is no ‘clear’ reason why one person couldn’t do it alone.
There are factors related to a singe person being responsible for everything that may make it impractical but it is certainly possible. When I was in that space,we used to get submssions from people all the time (1-2) man teams that could be put in the budget title bin. In addition, the economics of the J2ME space almost dictates a single or 1-2 developer team (if that helps). So really - it depends on you. If you have the discipline to do it alone - sure, it can be done.
Its small groups of people who change the world.