After conquering PlayStation VR owners with Astro Bot: Rescue Mission and offering an adorable welcome gift to all PS5 owners with Astro’s Playroom, Team Asobi is now at work on its most ambitious game, confirms its creative director Nicholas Doucet. And this time, there is no question of finding it by default with new gear (randomly the PS VR2), because the next Team Asobi will indeed be a game marketed on PS5.
With just 35 employees when it became a full-fledged studio in the spring of 2021, Team Asobi is now home to a team of 60 people and expects to grow to 100 to meet its new needs. Needs including in particular a permanent focus on R&D, an activity which occupies 10% of the workforce on the basis of rotation between all the members of the team, just to always have new ideas.
“Our current mode of production is going well. But we want to have another group for R&D, and we want enough people in that group to explore all the areas that will interest us. And to possibly launch other projects“, summarizes Nicolas Doucet. “But we don’t set any limits. If the right people want to join the team, we’ll be ready to talk to them. There are always things to do. There are always new projects to undertake. We are not limited by money or time. If we could double the size of the studio just like that, we’d have work for everyone.“, he adds.
Based in Japan, Team Asobi aims to make games for a global audience while reflecting a certain local culture. And that trademark would be more a matter of feeling so many checkboxes. “We want to make sure that when people play our games, they feel, without being able to put their finger on it, that they were made in Japan.“, notes Nicolas Doucet, adding that 75% of the studio workforce is Japanese. In this context, local employees make the effort to learn English while foreigners learn Japanese.
In terms of working mode, Team Asobi has opted for a hybrid operation allowing a large part of the team to work from home. The employees, however, have a habit of meeting every two weeks in the new studio premises to show what they have been working on and take the game in hand in a friendly atmosphere. This gives the studio the impression of favoring spaces for playing rather than for working.
“It’s important to have those practical moments where we sit, play and talk. We have created a studio that matches that. The face-to-face moments, passing the controller, asking people if it’s okay with them… you can have these conversations from a distance, but it’s not the same as being on the same couch in the same room“, testifies Nicolas Doucet.