Why Games Now Take 6+ Years To Make

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Hello. So, last week I did a video about why video games have gotten so expensive to make and I did a little bit of napkin math to kind of calculate the burn rate that studios go through, which if you remember, I mean, you can go check out the video, but just as a quick refresher, it's essentially labor costs, which is not just people's salaries, but also their benefits and other added expenses such as overhead, um cost of office, rent, and uh I don't you know, studio supplies, stuff like that, office supplies, but it's almost entirely labor costs. And that's how we're getting into this world where uh games are costing 200, 300, 400 million dollars to make.

[00:00:42]But something that I didn't do, I I was playing around with the numbers a little bit and and talking about how games um the the more time you take in a game, the more expensive it is. But something I didn't do is explain how we've gotten to the point where games are now taking four, five, six, seven plus years to make. And so I wanted to address that today. Um, I've written about this a little bit and I'll throw in as usual some Bloomberg articles that you can check out in the YouTube description because I am still a full-time reporter at Bloomberg News. So, please support my work by reading it. But, I do want to break this down a little bit and I sent a few texts out. I asked a few people that I know in the games industry to kind of make sure that I I had all my facts straight and the context here. Um, the short answer is to the short answer to the question, why do games take so long to make now is a lot of reasons.

[00:01:30]There are a lot of factors and every game is the kind of confluence of all sorts of disrupting factors that you could see if you check out um if you if you're really in interested in this world and you're in it for the long haul, you should check out the Psych Odyssey documentary series which is free on YouTube. Um you have to be willing to commit because it's very long. It's something like 20 25 hours, but it's uh essentially a 33 episode uh behind the scenes look at the making of Psychonauts 2. and it will show you how a game can blow up to six years um through all sorts of twists and turns along the way.

[00:02:04]But again, I I want to do provide a little bit of info here. So, um it's a lot of factors and I want to break down at least a few of them. This is not a comprehensive list by any means, but it is a list of some of the major factors that could contribute to a video game taking six plus years to make. So, let's go through them. Let's go through I have I have a list of I don't know about six of them. Let's go through six of them.

[00:02:27]Number one reason why games take so long these days. Increased graphical fidelity. This might be the obvious one and this is the one that uh most people point to when it comes to games taking a very long time. So what does that mean?

[00:02:40]Games look prettier than they ever have.

[00:02:43]Um more fidelity essentially means more complexity. It means more specialization is required and it means you need more people to make a game and it means that those people need more time. What used to take one or two artists can now require a whole suite of people, an entire room full of people. Um, lighters and technical artists and VFX artists.

[00:03:05]Um, you might need 10 people to do what took one person in the past, and it might take them a week to do what might have taken a day in the past. Um, look, this seems obvious, but it's worth pointing out. When you shoot a movie, uh, you don't need to build every single tree or plate or cabinet in the background. In a video game, you do. And what once you could get away with kind of abstracting, now because of increased graphical fidelity requirements for these biggest games, you have to model and build and spend a lot of time making, even if a player is only going to see it for like a split second. And if you don't, I mean, you're probably going to get yelled at on the internet.

[00:03:42]You won't get as high a rating. player expectations have kind of gone up with this graphical fidelity expectation. I want to read uh I I got a really fun um kind of example from uh uh uh someone I know who works in the games industry who didn't want to be named, but this person is pretty high up at a aaa games company. And um I asked him, "Hey, why do you think games take longer?" And he was talking a little bit about the graphical fidelity thing. He brought up Final Fantasy 4, um the Super Nintendo game that was called Final Fantasy 2 here in the in North America. Um and there's a scene in Final Fantasy 4, if you haven't played it, where these two characters, Palm and Porum, turn into Stone, uh saving the party, and it's this emotional moment. The music swells.

[00:04:25]It's really cool. They're in this little room, and it it affects you despite the fact that it's like tiny SNES pixelated graphics. And this person was telling me at most he thinks five people made that scene happen. At most, it was probably less than five people. Whereas nowadays, if you had to recreate that in a modern game with like the fidelity expectations of a modern gamer, you would need a concept artist. You would need modelers, high-res modelers. The characters would need to be skinned and rigged and animated. You would need shader specialists for the clo clothes that they're wearing. You need physics specialists to support their hair. You need a sound designer. You need cinematics animators and designers. You need a narrative designer. You need a lighter for the scene, a tech artist, a VFX artist. You need some programming support for the scene and for the transitions in and out of cut scenes. Uh you would need writers for the scenes.

[00:05:18]Of course, you would need a voice actor, voice actors for the characters. You need a director for the performance, a casting director for finding the actors, audio, audio mastering, audio direction, composer, orchestra. Uh oh, and also that room that is portrayed on in Final Fantasy 4 as like essentially a little square box that has nothing in it. That would need to be, if you're looking at that in 3D, that would need to be a full-on room with like its own design and props and its own level artists and designer and lighting. It can't just be empty. You'll need tech designers, you'll need QA, etc., etc. So, like this is what we're talking about these days, which has only gotten more and more pronounced over time. So, that's reason one, graphical fidelity. Um, reason two kind of springboards on that, which is the bigger your team gets, and as we just established, it needs to get bigger for to keep up with these expectations, the harder it is to manage. Um, the more people you have on a team, uh, the more managers you need, the more producers you need, the more time you need to put into making sure everybody is communicating. Something I've heard pretty consistently from AAA studios is how difficult it is to communicate and to make sure everyone's on the same page. And one of the reasons for that is that game development has so many little decisions that just need to be made all the time. um so many just kind of both both big and small decisions that are just constantly being made and trying to communicate that across an entire team can be really difficult. Um a lot of people try to have wikis and design documents that often a lot of people don't read. A lot of people use tools like Jira which keep t uh track of tasks and a lot of people just don't update it because it's kind of a pain if you're trying to do a bunch of work. The last thing you want to think about is like going and updating your Jira tasks or whatever. So that's a whole challenge in and of itself. I mean, here's a good example of that. Um, Bethesda Game Studios, uh, they made Skyrim, which was put out in 2011, still considered one of the greatest games ever made, an open world RPG. Uh, they made that with around 100 people, whereas Starfield, their most recent game, which came out in 2023, was made uh, by a team of around 400, 500 people. Um, Skyrim, you could fit all those people in a room.

[00:07:31]They could work together, and they were all in the same studio. they were all in um in Bethesda's Maryland uh studio whereas Starfield was made by studios I believe they have four studios not to mention all the codev and outsourcing that worked on that game. So we're talking about uh exponential increases in team size and that leads inherently to just more time. The bigger a team the harder it is to manage. Also springing springboarding off of this is uh is explanation number three which is that scopes are bigger than ever. players are expecting these vast worlds um with skill trees and crafting and um puddles that reflect perfectly. Uh not to mention just kind of like design that is uh executed in a really cool and interesting way. Um and there good reason players should expect that. I mean players should expect big things and good things, but um uh scopes need to swell and and increase to account for that. Um, and you can't get away with just being like, it's it's very rare to be able to be like, actually, we're just making a small scale thing. This is only going to be a 10 to 15 hour experience.

[00:08:38]And we'll see. I think some other some game publishers out there are trying to pursue that and see if they can get away with it. And we'll we'll see how well that works. But like, when we're talking about these budgets that have increased to 300, 400 million, you have to sell a lot of copies just to make a profit. Um, and if you need to sell five, ten million copies to break even, you have to reach a very wide audience. You cannot make decisions that would limit the audience of your game.

[00:09:03]And so your scope is increasing. You are trying to hit that checklist of like AAA features that every every AAA game has to have. Um, uh, and that winds up just adding a whole lot of time to your game.

[00:09:15]I think scope is is when combined with graphical fidelity, the scope of these games is really striking. Um, I think graphical fidelity, uh, if you were just to pursue graphical fidelity but limit your scope, um, you might be able to cut down your time a little bit. But those two kind of in conjunction, I think cause a lot of problems. Another thing, we'll get to reason number four. Another thing that has come up in recent years is just technical challenges. Um, whenever you are switching game engines, an engine, for people who aren't familiar, you've probably seen the name engine and you've probably seen it used in a lot of wrong context, but an engine is essentially just a a host of technology, a suite of technology that is used as a framework for your game. It is essentially what you are using to build your game. Um, could be a bunch of tools in there, could be various pipelines and um, graphical renderers and all sorts of stuff that is essentially uh, used to make your game.

[00:10:10]Um, a lot of companies either use their own engine or use uh, Epic's Unreal Engine. Unreal recently switched from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5. That happened around I don't know uh, early 2020s/ late2010s. Um, and uh, actually it happened early 2020s cuz it was like the PS5 era. So Unreal switched from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5 and a lot of people had to switch along with it which is a very timeconsuming process. If you are used to working with one iteration of the engine and then suddenly you have to do it on another that is very timeconuming.

[00:10:41]If you have already built things in Unreal 4 they're not necessarily going to smoothly transfer over to Unreal 5.

[00:10:47]We also had a console switch which also adds time to the equation. Um I was talking to Brandon Adler the director of Outer Worlds 2 at Obsidian for a story that I will link in the YouTube description. Check it out. Um by the way I throw uh gift links uh to all my Bloomberg articles in these YouTube descriptions. And so they're all going to be free for you to click on. You can bypass the payw wall just by clicking on them. Um so Brendan Aller, he told me that when they on Outer Worlds 2 when they switched from Unreal 4 and Unreal 5, that combined with COVID, which I'll get to in a second, um essentially it just took a year off their production.

[00:11:21]He told me, quote, I wish we could have that year back. They had a year where people just were not as efficient as they could be because of the tools, because of figuring out how to work from home and all sorts of other technical challenges. And remember, as graphical fidelity just increases, um, it gets harder and harder to figure out how you can optimize and how you can get your games running at the best possible frame rate, best possible resolution. There are a lot of cool technical innovations that we've seen in recent years, but uh, a lot of those bring with them just extra time that is added to the equation. People have to just spend more time getting familiar with the new technical uh, like abilities and and proficiencies efficiencies that you can use. um and also figuring out how to optimize for them. So that creates a lot of problems. Um number five, I'm gonna just say COVID because I think CO was a bigger disruption than people realize.

[00:12:12]Um if you think about a game that has taken six years and comes out this year, CO was in the middle of that and CO disrupted everybody's lives in all sorts of ways. I won't rehash everything. We we all remember it. We've all been through it. But one of the biggest is just just um retteing people how to think about games and how to work with people and just kind of changing the way the games are made on a really big scale. And uh I I have very strong feelings about remote remote work. I work remotely. I think remote work is a really good thing for a lot of people.

[00:12:44]But whether um a studio is pro remote work, anti- remote work, something in between, pursuing a hybrid, whatever they are, um the year or so that everyone was just trying to figure out how life would be in this pandemic, uh disrupted everything. Um it was technical stuff like trying to figure out how to even work, how to even check in in a build when, uh everybody's working from home, figuring that part of it out. Um it was child care and dealing with the actual like tangible effects of COVID and the disruptions that all these health problems had on people's lives.

[00:13:18]Um so it was just a massive disruption in all sorts of ways and that I think added a lot of time to people's schedules and so we're still seeing the repercussions of that. people are a lot of people are still trying to figure out how to get back to to kind of um working together after co um the creativity I mean collaborating uh via remote work like trying to figure out how to make that work works better for some studios than others. Um some studios have become remote first and uh uh I mean uh Bungie and Insomniac and a few others are just kind of supporting people wherever they want to work and they've found ways found ways to make that work but others uh have really struggled with it. So that is just a whole whole monkey wrench into this entire generation. And I think if you're wondering why this generation has felt so weird and felt so just kind of like um uh less productive than previous console generations, I think COVID is one of the biggest, if not the biggest reasons. Um and let's do number six. Let's do a spicy one for reason number six. And I've written about this quite a bit over the years.

[00:14:19]Mismanagement.

[00:14:21]Mismanagement is a big broad term that I think can refer to a lot of different things, but is very applicable to the video game industry. So, what kind of mismanagement do we see in the games industry? Well, we see a whole lot of examples, and we can bring up some concrete examples. Um, probably number one in recent years is executives deciding that everything has to be a game as a service. And we saw that in everything from Dragon Age Veilgu Guard, which really struggled because it turned from a single player game into a game as a service and then back into a single player game, which caused all sorts of disruptions. And again, I'll link the article I wrote about that in the show notes. Um, we have uh Suicide Squad is another great example of just kind of you take this company that this game studio that is incredibly good at making one kind of game and you say, "Hey, actually, we're going to make a game as a service now, a multiplayer shooter."

[00:15:11]and it completely just throws a massive wrench into everything. Um, part of this, by the way, part of mismanagement, I would say, is not recognizing how long your game is going to take and therefore making everything less efficient as a result. Because if you are a game developer, if you are a programmer, a designer, an artist, and you think that your game is going to come out in I don't know 3 4 years, but actually it just keeps slipping and it keeps slipping six months at a time. That is not really six years of development.

[00:15:40]That is four years of development and then plus 6 months plus 6 months plus 6 months which makes you make these decisions thinking you are going to ship at a certain time only to have the rug pulled away underneath you which just adds more time to the whole equation.

[00:15:53]You cannot really do planning. You cannot do thoughtful decisionmaking and make good calls when you think your your release date is going to be at a different time than it actually is. So, I think it's worth noting here and and worth worth hammering on this point and thinking about this that sometimes when you see that a game has been in development for quoteunquote six years, it actually just means, oh, okay, three years and then uh another set of six-month delays that just like left us all just on shaky ground the entire time. So, consider that as well. Um, other examples of mismanagement, um, uh, Warner Brothers, I've written about them in recent years. That is a a studio Warner Brothers games where um they had a real problem a cultural problem of executives refusing to make decisions.

[00:16:39]So some of their studios just got kind of strung along for months if not years where um they couldn't get a straight answer from management about like whether they were going to be able to do something or not. That can be a problem.

[00:16:51]Um, you have cases of directors frequently changing things, revising things, um, coming in and and upending, throwing over the table and just throwing out months worth of work. Um, sometimes that can lead to a better product and sometimes it just means lots of struggling. Sometimes it's both. I mean, it it a lot of people acknowledge like, hey, this kind of iteration and just rethinking things can lead to a better product, but uh, but it it also just cost us all this time. Um maybe the the quintessential example of that is Ken Lavine, who I've written about quite a bit. Um whose recent game uh newest game Judis uh has essentially been in development since 2014. I mean 2014 is when uh 2K shut down Irrational Games, the makers of Bioshock and Ken Lavine started this new studio to make Judice.

[00:17:36]And um one of the biggest reasons that has been in development for as long as it has is just constant changes and revising and throwing things out all the time. Um, another uh kind of element of mismanagement is just um short-sighted decisions. Um, firing people, layoffs, breaking up team chemistry. Um, that can add a whole lot of time to the production. A lot of times what happens in these game companies is that people on the executive layer will make decisions um to juice up the profits of a quarter or to juice up to make it seem like they're more profitable in a quarter. um laying people off to please shareholders because nothing makes Wall Street happier than layoffs um and wind up cutting cutting into the bone and costing these productions a lot of time because they're getting rid of people who have a lot of experience um who are kind of integral roles on a project and it might take months to find ways to replace them. Sometimes I've heard stories over the years about like AAA game companies firing people and then realizing that they shouldn't have fired those people and just calling them up and being like, "So, what would it take to get you back here?" Turns out you're the only person who understands how this particular complicated part of our rendering pipeline works. So, can we hire you back? How much would we have to pay you to come back? Um, that's a big part of it. I talked in in my last video about Mina Hala, I talked about team chemistry. That's a huge huge thing um that uh a lot of game companies just have absolutely no respect for and no reverence for. Um and so they'll break up teams that have built good chemistry.

[00:19:10]Um a lot of times we're seeing especially in recent years because of the current climate and because of these huge budgets and how much it's taking and how there's really no um there's no uh room for failure anymore. We're seeing companies give up on games when they could have been these like strong foundations for future projects. And I'll give you a good example of that. Um Star Wars Outlaws, which I think was a good, not quite great game, a game with some flaws, but a real foundation that I think could have led to really great things with the sequel. And Ubisoft instead chose to cancel the sequel. Um granted, there were a number of reasons for that, but still, I think Sour Outlaws 2, a sequel to that game, could have really gone from good to great.

[00:19:52]sort of like how we saw in the PS3 generation, a lot of games just kind of find their footing and then build off that foundation to make something really great. Um, Mass Effect is a good example of that. Uncharted is a good example of that. Assassin's Creed is a good example of that. Those are all games where like the first title was good, not quite great, and the second game really elevated. It really took it to the next level because you had a team that understood what they were making, that knew how to make games together, that knew the technology and the pipelines, that could see fan criticism and respond to that. So, a lot of um people that a lot of companies that just give up on the first game uh and don't give that team a chance to make something else are really just kind of costing themselves in the long run. Um, one more example of mismanagement that I'll bring up real quick is just kind of not using pre-production properly. And this is a little bit more in the weeds, but I ran this story um a few months ago from Josh Sawyer, who is the director of games like Pentiment and Fallout New Vegas. He works at Obsidian and uh he told me something really interesting which is that he really believes strongly that um pre-production is the time to take big swings and do crazy experiments and stuff like that. And a lot of people are tempted to um do the same even when they get into production. So essentially game development is split into these two phases. You have pre-production and then you have production. Production is when you have a lot more people working on the project. And the idea is pre-production you establish what the game is going to be. Production you actually make the game. Um, so pre-production often ends with what's called a vertical slice, which is essentially a chunk of the game that is meant to display, hey, this is the graphical fidelity we want. This is what the systems that we want. This is like what a chunk of the game should look like. So everybody can see that and be like, okay, now we're going to make more of this and build out the game in that way. And what Sawyer says is that often in production, people start changing a bunch of things and it's extremely risky and extremely disruptive. Um, and he points out that um, uh, that uh, uh, you should be doing that in pre-production.

[00:21:54]If you do it in production, it it can cause a lot of problems. Um, and I'll quote him. He said to me, this is for Bloomberg. He said, I tend to be fairly conservative and say, "We already figured this out. We're not going to redo it for a theoretical 15% gain in X, Y, and Z because the potential to screw up the rest of the project is enormous.

[00:22:11]You're going to waste a bunch of people's work, and you're going to eat up a bunch of time." So, that's another reason. Um, I could go on and on about mismanagement. I think mismanagement might be the biggest of these reasons.

[00:22:22]Um, the most significant. Um, there are certainly some and game devs I've talked to would argue that graphical fidelity is the biggest reason. But I think from a kind of at least from my outside perspective, I think mismanagement I've seen have have the biggest impact on some of these timelines. And some of the most infamous examples of games that have taken six plus years to make are the result of some serious mismanagement. um that often uh if you're on the inside you you don't really even see or know about until a little bit later until it's time to postmortem the project. But those are some of the reasons and hopefully that adds a little bit of context uh if you're wondering why some of these big games are taking so long. Um and granted I mean I think the I'll end on this note which is maybe the seventh reason which is that which is a positive reason which is that creativity takes time and greatness takes time. Um, I was just uh just re-watching this old documentary uh from 2003 that MTV made about Blink182 making what most people consider to be their best album, the Untitled album.

[00:23:24]Um, and uh, they spent like a year straight just living out of this house in this studio and just tooling away at it and recording. And this documentary has all these great shots of them being like, "This is hell." Like this is like there's one shot of Tom Dange uh the guitarist and one of the singers uh just being like recording is like this and he takes this kind of like this little tool thing that is like one of those like um I don't know like going it goes back and forth. It's like a little tool that goes like this and he just puts it in front of his crotch and it's like pull right into his crotch. He's like recording music is like this which I think a lot of people can relate to if they've ever tried to make art. Uh, of course it's worth it in the end, but it's worth noting that uh, good art takes a lot of time and can't be rushed. And I think that as games have just kind of grown and matured as a medium and people have started to really understand all the cool things you can do with games, um, they have realized that it takes a lot of time to make a lot of this great stuff. And I think some of the greatest games we've seen in recent years have taken a lot of time. Um, you know, the hollow ridges came out. That's fantastic. took six years to make. Uh last year's Silk Song, I wrote a story for Bloomberg about why that took six, seven years to make. Yeah, I said six, seven. Okay, don't don't don't make a big thing of it. Um uh that artic I mean that story is essentially like those guys being like we were having a ton of fun and like we wanted to make a done ton of good stuff and put a ton of details into it and just took a lot of time. Um Blueprints, my favorite game of the generation perhaps that came out last year after eight years of development. So even games that aren't like achieve trying to achieve this incredible graphical fidelity, even smaller scale games take a lot of time.

[00:25:07]And to some extent, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think um a lot of people are trying to figure out how to shorten game time, but sometimes I mean we're talking about art, so sometimes that might not be possible. Maybe not every game has to take six to eight years. See, I avoided seeing six seven there. Maybe not every game has to take six to eight years to make because I mean if you're a creative person and you're like spending six to eight years per game. You you only have so many uh over the course of a an average lifespan. So I mean that's something to consider as well. But at the end of the day I mean if we're getting more games like Blueprints and Silkong and Mina the Holar then uh maybe we should welcome long game times as much as uh the big budget studios might not want to do that. Um, I think they're I I don't know how many of them are going to be able to shorten dev times. I think uh unless they go for smaller scale, less graphical fidelity, as that one kind of famous meme goes. Uh what is it? I want shorter games uh uh made by people who are paid more with less graphics, etc., etc. I just butchered that quote, but whatever. Don't have it in front of me. Um all right, that is it for this week's episode of Jason Talks on a Camera. Um, I am heading to Los Angeles this week for Summer Games Fest.

[00:26:22]So, you probably won't see any more videos from me um for a little bit unless I shoot something there for fun and and go around talking uh at Summer Games Fest. Maybe I'll do something like that. But yeah, thank you for watching and I will see you next time.