 Games these days are taking a really long time to make. This is something that's become very prevalent in recent years and something I've been thinking a lot about. There was a point in time years ago back in the good old days when every year would be populated with really high quality hit games and you could expect even more the year after. We would get original IPs, sequels to beloved franchises, games with wild, innovative new ideas year after year but sometime during the last console generation things started slowing down a bit. I find it crazy that we essentially went a whole generation without a new Elder Scrolls or new GTA, meanwhile the generation before gave us at least a few new entries in almost every franchise and we were seeing way more original IPs as well. It feels to me like AAA gaming is changing and the entire industry as we know it is shifting towards this trend of releasing one game per decade but why is this happening? Well that's something I want to discuss so today we're going to talk about why games are taking forever to make. Let's begin. Now I'm no game developer but there's a lot that can be inferred based on the way studios have been handling game announcements. I think this phenomenon has a lot to do with a combination of several factors. The main one being that often times game developers announce games before they even start working on them. It sounds insane but it's happening right in front of us. Nowadays at every E3 year summer games fest you see devs announcing games with a pre-rendered cinematic trailer with no gameplay whatsoever. This is because more often than not at this point usually only conceptual stuff is done but the game itself is not even close to being playable or even shown off. An extreme example of this is the Elder Scrolls 6. They announced this back in 2018 with a very generic teaser trailer that didn't tell us anything and left us with that for years. Bethesda only just announced this past month that they just started early development of it now. Five years after the game was announced. What the actual shit? Why would you announce a game that early if you have nothing to show? Well if you think about it there are a lot of reasons companies would do this. It could be to appease investors and keep their company relevant. I mean they did just get acquired by Microsoft not too long afterwards. It could also be to prevent fans from losing interest. In any case I think it's just crazy that they would do this. At this rate the game might come out five years from now. That'd be 17 years after Skyrim's release. Almost two decades of waiting for one game. This is more common than you would expect. Dragon Quest 12 is basically the Japanese version of this. They announced the game in 2021 again with a teaser trailer that doesn't actually show anything but the logo and they haven't even talked about it since. They also had barely anything done when they announced it. Hori himself said that they only had the basic story outlined. They were still hiring for the project when it was announced. So who knows how many years away it is. At this rate it will be the longest time we've ever waited for a new Dragon Quest. I honestly think they just needed some big announcement for the 35th anniversary and we really weren't ready to show it off. Again to appease fans and investors and keep interest in the franchise high. It's just crazy to me that companies would do this to such an extreme extent. And it really does feel like this is happening to pretty much every big developer. GTA 6 is probably still years and years away. There hasn't been any new word on the next Persona even though it's been like seven years. The Witcher 4 probably isn't coming for a while. Even games that used to be cranked out yearly like Assassin's Creed have started to slow down. There hasn't even been a proper 3D Mario in six years. That is crazy to me. You would never have seen this a few generations back. And indie games aren't even exempt either. Those games have huge scopes often times and tiny developer teams most of the time. Again, we've been waiting since 2017 for Hollow Knight's silk song. It feels like every good game just came out in 2017 and since then we've been just waiting and waiting for the next wave of good games. The second factor that I think is leading to games taking forever to release has to do with games just being more complex than ever before. Video games are essentially very expensive, very complex software projects that require hundreds of skilled workers in different departments laboring day and night. In a way they're treating game production like movies. The reason it's come to this is because as technology has gotten better expectations have become higher. Nowadays every game has to have a huge world with a bigger size and scope and campaigns are longer than ever. Games have to have at least 80 hours of content for some consumers or it won't be worth it for many. These changes come with strict development cycles, longer rendering times, more attention to detail and animations, AI, scripting, environments, modeling, every object in the game world has to be individually modeled, every landscape sculpted, everything just needs to be up to date with the times. Games have so many moving pieces compared to before that all need to work together to deliver a finished product. And with all this complexity, any programmer will tell you that it is very easy for everything to fall apart, which is why a significant amount of time has to go towards bug fixing and player testing. There is so much that goes into development of a single game that the triplet industry has turned game development into more of a business and less of an art form. It's always been a business, but now goals have leaned a lot more towards making money rather than satisfying customers. Budgets are higher, which means stakes are higher too. Developers are putting their eggs in one basket and risking it all with each product. A failed game is much more severe than before and can mean the closure of an entire studio, which is why developers don't take risks anymore. Almost every game that releases nowadays is part of some recognizable franchise because brand new IPs are just too risky. There's a lot less creativity nowadays too. Before, I feel like there would be a decent mix of sequels and new IPs. Now, not so much. And at the end of the day, the question is, is it even worth waiting 10 plus years for a new game? Honestly, not really. Before games focused on the essentials people cared about, good gameplay, good design, good story, the art style took more precedence over the visual fidelity. Nowadays, they focus on so many details that prolong development time and if they miss that holiday release window, some companies will straight up delay a game an entire year to time their release properly. At the rate they're going, I could honestly see studios putting out one game per generation going forward, which is a sad reality. I mean, I want games that really push the envelope like Red Dead Redemption 2, you know, games where you just look at it and go, wow, I can't believe I can actually play something like this. But this means that you'll be waiting potentially 10 years or more for a new title to release. I'd honestly take games that aren't as detailed but have more focus on the game design and playability if it means we won't wait that long. But the reality is that most people just won't accept that. We've already gone to the point where people say, this looks like a PS3 game to insult a new game's graphics, even though I thought the PS3's graphics were mind-blowing at the time. The general population just won't accept anything below a certain threshold and that threshold keeps getting higher every year. I still regularly play these old PS2 games and to me, they're honestly fine, better than most stuff nowadays. And I wouldn't mind if developers just went back to the basics and started making games like that again to save time, but I know it'll never happen. I don't think it'll be too long until developers just completely write off making new games altogether. They're really expensive, extremely risky, and super time consuming to make. I could honestly see a shift where a game studio is pushed to make just one game that will continue to get updates and DLC for a prolonged period of time, which sadly nowadays seems to be a much more sustainable business model. These live service games sadly seem to be the future and I could definitely see companies just having one big game for an entire generation and just updating it and working on it. It seems like things are going that way. Overall, I think this is an issue that will eventually figure itself out however the developers decide to. In the end, my advice to people waiting for the new GTA or the new Elder Scrolls or whatever new game for the past 10 years is that these games might not even be that great in the end and you could always just spend your time doing something else, including playing some already released games that you never got around to trying. The new games will be here when they're ready and until then, it's a great opportunity to catch up on games you haven't tried before.