A few long-running Japanese video game companies—well, Nintendo and Arc System Works, namely—recently expressed a desire to let their younger talents take the reins more. Nintendo mentioned wanting to create opportunities for young talents showcase their abilities, and from what I'm seeing there's a sense of a "shifting of the guard" within Nintendo, with old developers who'd been around since the NES era stepping down. New entries in decades-old series are being helmed by new people.
Arc System Works recently released a Direct-style video announcing their upcoming projects which was so universally panned you'd thought they were about to kidnap and eat babies. Despite being known for making fighting games, none of the new games they showcased are fighting games, nor are they new entries or spin-offs in the series people have been looking forward too (with apologies to Bubble Bobble fans), and even I, number one Arc System Works glazer, think it was pretty darn underwhelming.
However! It does have Daisuke Ishiwatari, rocker extraordinaire and father of beloved fighting game series Guilty Gear, showing up and telling things to us straight: "The game market is tough right now." To help ensure the studio's sustainability, he wanted ArcSys to also make mid-budget action games, beyond their usual high-budget fighting games. He spefically mention how the game industry is kinda wedged between big time AAA games and excellent indie titles, which makes it difficult for young creators to have their own projects. (And before you ask, "but indie titles are made by young creators, no?" that's actually a pretty rare case. Most succesful indie titles are made by veterans who'd had experience in bigger studios before)
(Ishiwatari also mentioned how Guilty Gear started out as a small project back then too. I looked it up. It was made by TWELVE developers, over only A YEAR AND A HALF. Just kill me now why don't you.)
Anyway, where was I? Large and mid-sized companies with relatively stable income making way for mid-budget titles and new developers is really really good! This is especially good for the game industry, because of how game development itself works.
Some disclaimers: I've only been in the indstry for about two and a half years, all of that as a programmer, half of that as a junior in a major company (by the country's standard) with 300+ staffs, and the other half as a senior in a small studio (about 10 staffs). I'm half-guessing as to what bigger, international studios, are like, and in any case, each studio varies. Take these with grains of salt and assume I'm just yapping at the wall.
That said! Games are notorious for having really specialized knowledge to make! Not in that you need to be a specialist in a specific field, more that each game's development can be so different that starting a new game is effectively resetting your progress. This is why it's very helpful when a game can reuse assets or have sequels that have similar gameplay to its predecessors. This specialization is also why institutional knowledge is very important—there's just so much knowledge that can't simply be "taught" to someone new— and why breaking up studios or firing key staffs can be catasthropic.
So it's pretty difficult to train someone new; junior developers tend to work on more menial tasks and it can be difficult for them to trusted for more complex jobs. With how cutthroat the market is going, companies might prefer to not take that risk and just pour resource onto senior staffs instead.
There also really aren't a good module that you can follow to train new developers aside from "go, my interns, make a new game for us", but that requires a level of trust and supervision from more senior developers that a lot of studios just can't afford. The fact that Nintendo and ArcSys are willing to do this is a really good sign for both companies.
There's also the matter of hierarchical structure in bigger companies. Games, especially in small studios, can be kinda weird about structures or leadership because there are people taking up a lot of roles: a programmer who's also a game designer who's also an artist, etc, etc. The nature of game development is such that these roles are in constant flux with each other, e.g. the art director might be the one deciding how a part of the game should look, but they have to do it within the contraints set by the programmers and the writers and every other role.
In bigger studios, the roles can be pretty specialized: a narrative designer might not be the story writer, the UI artist is not the UX designer, etc etc. There are only so many people who get to make decisions in a game; the majority of developers just do what they're ordered to do, which makes it difficult for juniors to show what they're capable of. In the face of a bigger team and more steps to go to the decision-makers, newer developers can get easily overwhelmed and afraid to speak up beyond the role they were designated to.
Apropos of that, I'm reminded of the time in my old studio where I said I'm ready for more responsibilities, and they said they can't promote me because I have no leadership experience... which I didn't have because I was never given the chance for one, which they won't give me because I'm too low in the rank. Chicken and egg, man! What was I supposed to do in that situation?
So yeah, actively helping junior members to take a more hand-on approach in making games is good! Your studio won't fall apart when a senior get sick or left the industry! You get more fresh ideas! You can diversify your knowledge base!
... man I just hope this industry can work, that it can give stable jobs, that people can keep making games and playing games, that the games are good, honest conversations between us. I keep hearing horror stories of studio shutdowns every month or so, of games that takes ages and ages and ages to make, and then within the same breath, new and beautiful games coming out faster than I can inhale them. May we all be able to make and/or enjoy those beautiful games.
