Over the last few years, the Grinding Gear Games team has grown significantly in size. When we launched Open Beta in 2013 we had fewer than 25 people in our team. We're now up to 120 and counting! We thought you might be curious about how many people are filling how many roles so we have written an overview of the GGG team's composition.
Let's start with the obvious - Chris, Jonathan and Erik, the three main co-founders of Path of Exile are our CEO, CTO and Art Director respectively. Our programming team has 14 people, including two web programmers. Among the other programmers are various roles like gameplay programming, UI programming, and more! Our administrative team that includes payroll, finance and office assistants is made up of six people. Our community team includes four people as well as nine translators who share the responsibility of translating the game files and our news posts. Our customer support team is currently made up of 18 team members who typically work in groups of two to four 24/7! Our quality assurance team is comprised of 14 people, many of whom have been playing Path of Exile since Closed Beta in 2011. As far as sound for Path of Exile goes, we have three people working on this. Two audio engineers and our composer, Kamil! Our game design team explicitly has five members, however, many people outside of the game design team contribute to its overall design. Our level design team has three members and uses assets from the art team to construct new areas and worlds. We have eight 3D artists and also outsource additional work to other companies when there is an overflow of work. We have four high-poly artists who sculpt initial high-detail 3d models based on concept art. We have one UI artist who works on a variety of projects like the in-game tutorial, microtransaction store, as well as many other aspects of the in-game UI and often assists with marketing/promotional material. We have five people on our Visual Effects team. This team makes all of the skill, monster and microtransaction effects! We have five animators and three riggers who all work together on various projects from monster and microtransaction animations to skill animations. We have seven concept artists who work on everything from in-game items, armours, environments to microtransactions, promotional material and Divination Cards. We have four people who exclusively work on production but there are other people in the team who also share the producer title while handling other tasks. For example, Carl is both part of the game design team and our lead producer. We have three server admins who take turns at being on call in case something needs to be tended to at night. We've also recently hired a new narrative designer who will pick up where we left off in The Fall of Oriath for our future expansions! It's also worth noting that this is a relatively simple overview. Many people in the company wear several hats and it's more accurate to think of each role as a web that connects to other roles. Each project has dozens of people contributing to it in various ways. Many of you have heard that Path of Exile started out in Chris' garage way back in 2006! The non-founders who worked in the garage and are still with us all these years later are Rhys and Harry, who are both part of the senior programming team. |
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