Over 10 Years After It Was Announced, Star Citizen’s Single-Player Squadron 42 Is ‘Feature Complete’ - IGN::Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games has said Squadron 42, the single-player portion of its controversial space sim, is finally “feature complete”, over a decade after it was announced.
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.
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.