How many people does it take to run a game studio?

Data from Screen Digest shows how many people are working at some of the larger video game publishing studios. The graph decrees Electronic Arts as the “largest” publisher with a staff that dwarfs all of the other competitors. Over 5,000 people work at EA, which is substantially over double compared to the number two publisher, Ubisoft. Something else interesting to note is that Sony has the largest internal development studio with over 2,200 people in their staff compared to under a 1,000 at Microsoft and Nintendo. Does more people mean better games? Not necessarily. There are plenty of great games coming out of smaller studios like Introversion Software, Q Entertainment (to be fair they have publishing help), Telltale Games, Atlus and Nippon Ichi / NIS America. However, having more people employed does mean more games on the marketplace. The exception of the rule is Nintendo, who manages to publish and develop many games every year, even though their development team is less than half the size of THQ.