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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It all depend on the complexity of the game. Of course if look at a simple game that was done 20 years ago, it was made in a year. But a simple game made today would also take a year to make. And the same thing for a complex game in the past and today, they would both take a lot of years.
WoW is a complex game and it took 5 years to develop the original. That was developed in 2001 so 22 years ago. In 2000 Perfect dark and Metal Gear Solid took 3 years to develop, they are not simple game, but less complex than WoW.
Then if you look at 2022 you have Elden Ring that took 5 years, and you can see that it’s a game closer to WoW than Perfect Dark in term of complexity.
The difference isn’t that big honestly. Especially since you have to take into consideration the size of the development team. A team of 20 people that take 5 years to make a game is the same amount of man hours as a team of 50 people working for 2 years.
I think the reason you have this perception is just that we hear a lot more about video game development today, than we used to in the past.
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