And there's a massive trickle-down in terms of what very small teams are able to accomplish now by leveraging modern tools, engines, and art pipelines. It astonishes me to this day that Hollow Knight was basically developed by three people, including all the writing, art, design, and programming— there's definitely more content in that game than what passed for triple-A in the PSX era, maybe even PS2.

It's easy to say "oh this modern indie game was made by only X people!" forgetting that the [open source] stack it was developed on has hundreds if not thousands of contributors.

So no, Hollow Knight wasn't developed by three people "including all the programming". It uses Unity. Unity is worth billions and employs thousands of people, many of them certainly programmers.

I agree though that very few people are needed nowadays for the art. With generative AI, even less. (But that's also sort of an [open source] giant to stand on the shoulders of with countless contributing artists.)

Well if you see it that way, the original diablo was also written by the hundreds of people that wrote windows, the GPU drivers etc etc.

Almost no software is written in a vacuum, but it doesn't really make sense to always include all preexisting dependencies in work estimates.

we can go that route too when talking about EV batteries production emissions vs ICE but sure we don't because that's not the point, right?

The downside of this is of course that there are so many high quality games to compete with now