Ngmoco's Cousins: Mobile teams will expand dramatically in the near future

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Due to increases in technology and audience size, Ngmoco's Ben Cousins, now heading up its new studio in Stockholm, predicts that team sizes will swell to similar sizes to console projects. "I think that we're rapidly going to see an increase in performance, and I give it four years' time before the mobile teams are probably going to be as big as the console teams were at the start of this generation: you know, 50, 60 people," Cousins told Gamasutra. "I think that's because the install base for these things is going to get bigger. Everyone who has a feature phone will end up having a smartphone. Everything is going to be to play for." Cousins' current studio only has plans to grow to 15 to 20 people in the immediate future, and to ship a game in approximately one year. "We'll see some transition of console gamers. Some of the console gamers, or some of the high ARPU kind of people, are going to be playing on console, and on smartphone and tablet. And I think it's going to be a bigger overall economy for these devices, which is going to justify bigger audiences for the hits." "But then there's also going to be an arms race between the big guys, and once monetization is solved, and usage patterns are solved, it's going to be much more about production values, and I think we're going to see a repeat of what we saw on console." In the full interview, Cousins further describes what he expects to happen to the market. While the studio's game has not been announced, Gamasutra did report on its recent hires -- including developers from DICE and former high-level Crytek staffers. The full feature interview with Cousins is live now on Gamasutra.