Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has explained to Japanese magazine Famitsu that video game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated in the future and that mergers…
It doesn’t have to though. Tools are so easy to use now and the gaming industry will never have a shortage of people trying to get jobs in it, there is no reason that so many games need to be spending 5+ years in devepopment.
Yes, I have. A small team can launch a small/medium size game in less than two years using current tools. Game jams, albeit almost never ending up with complete games, last for usually one week and the end result is basically a vertical slice of a game nearly always built by a single person.
Again, there is no reason a game spending 5+ years in development should be considered average or normal.
Even in the past, AAA studios could complete successive games in a shorter amount of time. Metroid Prime 2, Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the good one from 2005), and Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask were all developed by reusing code and assets from the games that came before them, and game development tools were not as easy to work with then as they are now. Metroid Prime 1 was developed in 3 years, Ocarina of Time was developed in 3 years, and Battlefront 1 was developed in 2 years. All of these were developed with AAA funding and took less than 5 years on tools with less accessibility than modern tools.
Some of the games I like the most – some roguelikes fit into this camp – had very small teams working for a long period of time on a game, spending a long time iteratively refining the gameplay.
I’m not so sure that I prefer the “wide” model of many people for a short period of time versus a few people for a long period of time. Certainly there are things that the “narrow” model can and has done well that the “wide” model hasn’t.
It doesn’t have to though. Tools are so easy to use now and the gaming industry will never have a shortage of people trying to get jobs in it, there is no reason that so many games need to be spending 5+ years in devepopment.
Have you ever worked on a game?
Yes, I have. A small team can launch a small/medium size game in less than two years using current tools. Game jams, albeit almost never ending up with complete games, last for usually one week and the end result is basically a vertical slice of a game nearly always built by a single person.
Again, there is no reason a game spending 5+ years in development should be considered average or normal.
Even in the past, AAA studios could complete successive games in a shorter amount of time. Metroid Prime 2, Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the good one from 2005), and Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask were all developed by reusing code and assets from the games that came before them, and game development tools were not as easy to work with then as they are now. Metroid Prime 1 was developed in 3 years, Ocarina of Time was developed in 3 years, and Battlefront 1 was developed in 2 years. All of these were developed with AAA funding and took less than 5 years on tools with less accessibility than modern tools.
Some of the games I like the most – some roguelikes fit into this camp – had very small teams working for a long period of time on a game, spending a long time iteratively refining the gameplay.
I’m not so sure that I prefer the “wide” model of many people for a short period of time versus a few people for a long period of time. Certainly there are things that the “narrow” model can and has done well that the “wide” model hasn’t.