Modern AAA games don't seem sustainable at all. Used to be a few years between games and these were games with amazing stories and gameplay elements and a ton of content. Now it's like a 5+ year wait at a minimum for hardly anything.
I've said this before. Fallout 5, the next Elderscrools, and GTA 6 may be the last ones in the series that long time adult gamers get to play before. If you were the legal age to buy GTA 1 when it came out You're in your 40s. With 10-20 year dev cycles you could very well be dead or unable to play games when the next version comes out.
It took the same amount of time to make Halo 1-3 as it did from 5-Infinite and Infinite to the next one will probably be even longer.
Fallout 5 may not even come out in time for the next console generation.
It's even crazier to think about the people developing them.
You either have a revolving door of developers coming in over the span of almost a decade to get a game across the finish line, or you have developers spending massive portions of their careers on a small number of projects that may or may not have disastrous, costly launches after all that time.
It is definitely the former, which adds to the time it takes to make as well. Plus lots of companies use contractors which takes even longer but saves money in the short term.
Insomniac does not have that problem that is a management issues more than anything, budgets are totally busted because money isnt flowing to good artists and professionals.
Its not so much all AAA games its just the huge studios that are expected to hit insane benchmarks from gamers. If Bethesda, EA or Activision release something that doesn't hit 4K, 120FPS and be at least 40 hours worth of good gameplay its seen as a failure nowadays. All of these things make the game take so long to make. If more people were happy with the smaller games and not having to have photo realistic graphics I could bet the games would come quicker.
38
u/Zach983 Apr 21 '24
Modern AAA games don't seem sustainable at all. Used to be a few years between games and these were games with amazing stories and gameplay elements and a ton of content. Now it's like a 5+ year wait at a minimum for hardly anything.