As ‘Astro Bot’ Receives Near-Universal Praise, Team Asobi Head Reveals Key To Success Is Hiring Devs Who “Are Genuinely Interested Not Just In The Product Itself, But Also The Soul Behind It”
With the recent release of Team Asobi’s Astro Bot, PlayStation 5 players appear to finally have a game worth not only playing, but also writing home about.
The latest entry in the platforming series and the first title to be developed by Team Asobi since Sony made them an independent entity following the 2021 shuttering of their parent company JAPAN Studios, Astro Bot tasks players with controlling the eponymous Astro Bot and helping him jump, float, and even punch his way through the wilds of space, all the while collecting various treasures and trophies.
Notably, one of the selling points of the PS5-exclusive is its heavy thematic reliance on PlayStation history, with every bit of Astro Bot’s world from his ship, to the planets he explores, to the other robots he comes across in his travels taking some bit of visual inspiration from either a classic title or console.
And through a marriage of this respectful nostalgia with solid gameplay, Team Asobi have delivered a critical and audience winner.
Per review score aggregator OpenCritic, Astro Bot currently holds an average critic score of 95 across 85 reviews, with near every professional media outlet having given the game either a perfect or near-perfect rating.
An impressive result by any metric, what truly sells Astro Bot‘s success is the fact that it took a team of just sub-100 employees to craft a genuinely good PlayStation exclusive while their sister studios all struggle to produce anything less-than-controversial with far larger work forces and far more inflated budgets – just look at Naughty Dog and The Last of Us II, Sony Santa Monica with the new God of War series, and of course, Firewalk Studios with Concord.
And according to Team Asobi themselves, the secret to their game’s quality is no secret, but rather a very simple bit of common sense: Rather than just picking people to ‘do a job’, they instead chooses to hire those individuals who are specifically passionate about the studio’s work.
“We’ve always kept a long-term approach of not just growing the team for one project, but growing the team for the future and to keep people,” studio head Nicolas Doucet told Video Games Chronicle‘s Andy Robinson during a recent Astro Bot-centric interview.
“For that reason we’ve been really, really cautious about growing the team slowly,” he continued. “It’s important for us to ensure that every member of our team is bringing something special and unique and has a real ‘game’ mind.”
“When we do interviews, we check first for whether they know our games and are genuinely interested not just in the product itself, but also the soul behind it,” Doucet further explained. “Because if you’re able to relate to the game and to the consumer, and if you care about how the user will feel when they’re playing, then it’s likely that you will care about how the people around you every day feel, right?”
“That’s an important conversation we have when we hire,” he concluded. “Besides the skills, it’s also about the attitude and the fit within the team. Sometimes, that means it takes us a long time, and our interview process can be tough because it’s not like you can absolutely tick every single box, and you never truly know until you can spend time together. But yeah, we are very cautious.”
Astro Boy is now available exclusively for the PlayStation 5.
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