I’ve dabbled very briefly before with game development personally but I am largely unknowing, so please take me as an extreme laymen.
As the title says, why does game development take so long? Specifically, games used to take a year to develop but now they take 3+ years for AAA games. I understand the improvement of gaming systems requires greater detail but shouldn’t that be offset by the improvements of technology/ development tools?
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The scope and level of detail has increased tremendously. Compare something like Pac-Man or Space Invaders (which were the AAA games of their time) to something like Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, etc… Those early games took several months to a year to make back then, but today’s tools allow us to make them in an afternoon. A modern AAA game contains a huge lot of assets (music, sound effects, dialogue, 3D models, textures,…), most of which is hand made. Drawing a 10×10 pixel sprite to look good might take some time, but making a full 3D modelled character, with textures, animations, voice over takes way more time.
Another aspect is the industry grew and specialized. There are a couple hundred people at Epic working on Unreal Engine, which is a tool to make games, and no team in the early days was more than a handful of people (just look at the credits roll then and now).
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