Video game development times are completely out of control. Six to eight years for a sequel is now the standard in the gaming industry. Industry insider Jason Schreier gets to the heart of the matter in the latest podcast and reveals the real reasons for this epic sloppiness.
It's not just a technical issue, but rather a massive, structural mismanagement on the part of the publishers. However, there are also positive developments.
Graphics obsession is eating up efficiency
Games look incredibly good these days, but this visual realism comes at a huge price. Higher graphical quality means exploding complexity in the workflow. Where a single artist used to build an entire scene, today it takes a whole army of specialists. "Games look prettier than they ever have. More fidelity essentially means more complexity""That sums it up perfectly," Schreier says.
A single moment in a game today passes through the hands of concept artists, character designers, animators, VFX professionals, and lighting specialists. The personnel effort is enormous. For the legendary petrification scene from "Final Fantasy IV," at most five people worked on it.
A modern remake of this very scene now consumes the labor of dozens of developers, including motion capture, orchestral sound, and shader specialists. This perfectionism stretches the timeline incredibly. And everyone wants to be paid for it. “Fairgames” (Break in) or “Star Wars Eclipse” are prime examples of this development.
Monster teams clog up communication
More staff doesn't solve the problem; it actually makes it worse. Huge studios are simply incredibly difficult to coordinate. “The bigger your team gets… the harder it is to manage“That’s what Schreier says. In mammoth teams, information gets lost, wikis gather dust unread, and Jira tickets escalate. Tiny design decisions constantly have to be routed through endless management levels.”
Bethesda perfectly illustrates the drama. "Skyrim" was developed in 2011 with around 100 developers. They all fit into one room. For "Starfield," 400 to 500 people across multiple studios and external partners worked on the code. The result wasn't a better game, but an organizational nightmare.
Publishers artificially inflate game worlds to meet the AAA checklist for the mass market. Anyone who needs to sell five to ten million copies just to recoup production costs isn't taking any risks. So, the executive suites cram every conceivable open-world cliché into the project. This takes years.
The top management is failing across the board.
The biggest problem, however, lies in the air-conditioned offices of the managers. Mismanagement is the ultimate time-waster in the games industry. Executives refuse to make fundamental decisions for months or completely change direction mid-production. This destroys months of hard work, as has been repeatedly demonstrated in the past.
BioWare's "Dragon Age: The Veilguard" is the prime example of this madness. Initially intended as a purely single-player game, it was then transformed into a live-service game on orders from above, only to be reworked back into a single-player RPG in the end. Such radical changes of course squander years of development time.
Added to this is the current frenzy of layoffs by publishers. “Nothing makes Wall Street happier than layoffs,” Schreier aptly observes that studios fire experienced developers for the sake of short-term quarterly reports for shareholders. The painstakingly acquired expertise is lost. Later, new people have to be hired at great expense and trained for months. Anyone who then completely ignores pre-production and only addresses fundamental mechanics in the main development phase simply doesn't understand the craft.
Creativity takes time, but not chaos.
Of course, it's not all bad. Good art can't be rushed; that's the other side of the coin. Top quality arises from trial and error, discarding, and polishing. “Good art takes a lot of time and can’t be rushed”, stressed Schreier at the end. We'll accept that as an argument for exceptional titles. When a studio like Rockstar spends years fine-tuning the details, we feel it in the gameplay. But if a game takes eight years because the management changes genres three times, that's not a sign of quality, but rather a collective management failure.
The current AAA cycle has collapsed. As long as publishers focus on soulless checklist features and maximum team sizes instead of fostering lean, focused structures, we will continue to wait, languishing in old age, for sequels.
