Signing you in

Published: October 18, 2026, 10:09 pm Last updated: October 20, 2026, 10:19 am | Share { copied = false; shareOpen = false; }, 2000)" title="Copy link" aria-label="Copy"> {shareOpen = false}, 2000)"> Share to X {shareOpen = false}, 2000)"> Share to Bluesky {shareOpen = false}, 2000)"> Share to Facebook {shareOpen = false}, 2000)"> Share to LinkedIn {shareOpen = false}, 2000)"> Share by email Matt Webster, CEO of Star Wars: Galactic Racer developer Fuse Games (or, as we're about to get to, one of the developers) should be taking nothing but victory laps this month. He's helped lead a team to release not just one of the best Star Wars video games of all time, but one of the best racing video games of all time, period.

Sadly, this is not (another) blog about how good this game is, but about how convoluted its development was, and how we're once again being confronted by a scenario where the hundreds of people who worked on a successful video game are having their hard work obfuscated and downplayed.

In an interview with GI.biz--which states plainly that "Galactic Racer was made by a core team of 75"– Webster goes into surprisingly stark detail about the game's "three tiers" of development, which yes included a core team working at Fuse in the UK, but also many, many other people working in the UK and worldwide. I'm going to post this entire section so you can read it in full:

Those people all worked on the game, and where they worked, how long they worked or what exactly they contributed doesn't matter. Galactic Racer was not made by “a core team of 75 people”. It was made, according to Moby Games (so give or take a couple) by 1109 people, regardless of where they live or how long they worked on it.

Webster says this is an approach that allowed Fuse to "scale capacity and capability", and even tries to pass it off as a structure that helps avoid the "personal impact to people" that comes with laying experienced, internal developers off whenever a team shrinks in size.

I'm not going to get too critical about Webster's own comments, though, because to an extent there are realities to this industry in 2026 that he just has to work with. What's really annoying me here is the post on GI.biz itself, which says "the most interesting story is the way the game was made, which, like the game itself, broke away from convention". Like we've seen everywhere from Manor Lords to Expedition 33, there's a bizarre tendency among both gamers and the media to latch onto these under-reported numbers as if they're evidence of some kind of heroic feat. But as with those two games, and now this one, those numbers simply don't add up, and to repeat them ad nauseam is grossly misrepresenting the realities of modern video game development.

Given this approach, where many of those external studios were only brought on for select tasks, I'm sure the 75 people at Fuse worked on the project for longer, but like, why even make that distinction? What is wrong with the video game industry where there's this constant need to raise drawbridges and selectively focus the spotlight?

Luke Plunkett Luke Plunkett is a co-founder of the website Aftermath.