this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Star Citizen has literally the highest budget of any game in history, by a factor of 2x. The second biggest one is Cyberpunk, which also has been in development since 2013. Gamedev has just spiraled a bit out of control and takes ridiculous amounts of time these days.
The only reason you see yearly releases of some other games is because they have multiple teams working in parallel and are just updating an already existing game engine. Doing stuff from scratch is a whole different thing.
Mostly agree with you here but I do have a minor correction. Cyberpunk was announced in 2013 but it didn't actually start development until sometime in 2016 after cdpr release The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine DLC.
Meaning cyberpunk only took roughly 4-5 years of development time before being released. Though it arguably needed much more time than that.
Yes but also does an enormous amount of waste at the moment. Sorry it now takes years to make a good game but it doesn't take a decade. Unless you're seriously doing something wrong or it's an entirely simulated universe with sepient life and everything.
GTA2 to GTA3, two years. GTAIV to GTAV, five years, GTAV to GTAVI 10 years and still waiting. See a pattern?
When you want to accurately simulate and animate every doorknob in the game it just takes a hell of a lot longer than putting a few pixel on a texture and calling it a day. And yes, there is in argument to be made that that level of detail doesn't actually add to the gaming experience in a meaningful way, but that's something a whole lot of AAA games struggle with and why we are seeing so many sequels and so little new things. StarCitizen just happens to be a new thing developed from scratch, including the studio itself.
The time between games is not the development time.
GTA III was only in development for one year. It wasn't in development for 2 years. Same with GTA IV. Rockstar do other things between releasing GTA games. In between developing GTA V and GTA VI Rockstar made two Red Dead Redemption games plus DLC for GTA V, you don't think they were working on GTA VI at the same time do you?
Also they did an engine update in there as well so they couldn't have been working on GTA VI until that was done. The absolute earliest date for the beginning development of VI is 5 - 6 years ago, and that's not to say that was the start date.
Games have gotten more complex and so have the teams to make them.
It use to be a few developers juggling multiple rolls to entire departments that only specialise in one thing.
To get all those different professions together to build a game is really hard because of communication. The best people are the ones who can do a bit of everything but large companies don't want that, they want specialists who do one thing.
You can program? You can also create 3D assets? Your good at audio? Well tough you have to pick one and you'll probably never interact outside your team.
And this leads to lots of fantastic ideas and creativity being lost not to mention bugs and other issues popping up.