Armored Core 6 and Elden Ring Were Made by a Development Team of Just 300 People

FromSoftware has been one of the most prestigious developers in the industry for a while now, not only because of how excellent virtually all of its games tend to be, but also because of how many of them the studio has developed in the last decade and a half. Just as impressive, in fact, has been how well the developed has often juggled multiple projects at once, which Yasunori Ogura, producer on the upcoming Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, recently touched on while speaking to PC Gamer.

According to Ogura, Armored Core 6 and Elden Ring, which came out last year, were both developed by a team totalling just over 400 people, of whom 300 people were development staff. “At peak times”, either project had about 200-230 developers working on at, with the studio “fluidly” shifting people back and forth between the projects as and when needed.

“We don’t expect players to read through the whole staff list at the end of every game and compare who’s who,” Ogura said. “To give a broad image, we have just about 400 employees at FromSoftware, and about 300 of those are development staff. That pool of development staff is shifted around, moved between projects as needed, depending on the current situation with a project and the current period of development.”

“At peak times, you’d have up to 200, 230 developers working on Armored Core 6,” he added. “This was similar to Elden Ring as well. At the peak period of that project, you’d have a similar number of staff working on it simultaneously. So staff is moved around fluidly as and when needed.”

While a team of about 300 developers isn’t a small one by any stretch of the imagination, the fact that FromSoftware has managed to develop two major AAA releases that are coming out this close to one another is impressive, to say the least, especially given how long most AAA projects across the industry now tend to spend in development.

Earlier this year, FromSoftware’s Yasuhiro Kitao said that the studio was hoping to have even shorter gaps between releases going forward.

Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon is next in line for launch in FromSoftware’s schedule, with the mech action title set to launch for PC and consoles in August, while the Japanese studio is also currently working on Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. The expansion, which has been in the works since 2022, doesn’t currently have a release date, but FromSoftware parent company Kadokawa has suggested that it will launch after the end of the current fiscal year (i.e. after March 31, 2024).

Meanwhile, leaks back in 2021 also claimed that the developer was working on a new PS5-exclusive Soulslike IP.