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What the.....?

I was looking around at some PBBGs to see what is out there and came across a game I had heard of a long time ago, Star Wars Combine. I clicked on their "Credits" page, since I am always curious if they are talking about the people who run the game or if they are selling credits for in-game purchases. In this case it was the people who make the game. But whoa....the size of this team is enormous! Take a look at it here.

I assume the majority of them probably just drop in and do some odds and ends every once in a while versus every person on this list working 20+ hours on the game. Because otherwise, this little PBBG has a team larger than many AAA console game studios.

Hahah that makes no sense. That is more people than a call of duty game.

That was my first thought! It is actually right about the size of the team who works on Call of Duty or most other AAA games (except for Skyrim or GTA; I believe those games typically have teams in the 100 - 400 size).

Looking around, I do have to say that the game does look very high quality. Its graphics are almost all 3D renders of the characters, and the GUI elements look very nice. So yeah, there is a lot of work there. But still, if all those people are working part-time on it, they would be in the neighborhood of being able to produce something like Star Wars: Galaxies haha!

Looks like they are pretty active as well.

2219 active members
312 are online

And yes the graphics are very nice for custom. I expected to see graphics from Poser when you said 3d still shots.

Wow, I didn't see that. That is very good for a PBBG today. Particularly a fan game one.

I just don't get how a team that big even gets together. I have to assume that it started as a small, core team of 1 - 3 people, they got the game going and then people kept coming to them wanting to contribute. There is no way they had 20+ team members before launch. Hell, it is hard to get a team of 5 members together pre-beta.

Haha no doubt. Yeah it is probably all past members as well, everyone that contributed at least something in its history.

From my own experience, once the game is running and you get a good amount of people playing, a lot will want actually to participate in a form or another even just to brag it At that point it's more efforts to avoid to have anyone breaking the changes of everyone else, or even just abusing his/her power.

Personally I would avoid to have too many people on the team and instead have a good team than just a large team of useless people. Even if that seems obvious, I had myself so much troubles with that... that it makes sense to re-say it

That is always what I had thought. But I do think Halls is probably right, in that this is probably a list of people who have worked on it over the years. I think I first heard of this game about 10 years ago. And actually, I just looked-up the entry on wikipedia and this game has been around for 20 years. And interestingly enough, LucasArts is actually aware of them and have permitted them to use the setting of Star Wars, which is pretty incredible knowing how defensive LucasArts has been over the years. I think it has something to do with this being a continuation of a licensed web game that existed in the late 90's based on the wikipedia page.

But I do totally agree. Community involvement in development would take a full-time position just to manage. But now seeing this game in the scope of 20 years, that giant list could be a list of only freelancers who worked on the game 1 or 2 at a time over the years.