Games really should be faster to make, shouldn’t they? After all, engines have grown in power, middleware is more abundant, and hardware architecture now semi-ubiquitous. So what gives?
Okay, gross over-simplication aside, here’s the bottom line: stronger tools have enabled loftier ambition, and that ambition has spiralled. Longer development cycles and skyrocketing budgets means the reality is fewer releases per studio. What’s more, expectation has grown in tandem with studio ambition. Publishers want bigger worlds, deeper mechanics, and sharper fidelity to match improvements in game development infrastructure, while players want value for money.
Neither can sustain the other indefinitely. What we have is a game development paradox, where slower timelines drive anticipation, and vice versa.
It wasn’t always like this. While the PS2-GameCube-Xbox generation of the early 2000s is remembered as a golden age for game development, where newfound complexity met creative freedom, it’d be remiss to class this era as easier. Shorter, linear experiences were common, with fewer systemic elements layering atop one another, but these were symptoms of weaker hardware. Ambition was contained behind limitations; fully-realised, but always with trade-offs.
In many ways, the spiral started here. As development tech grew in power, the scope of expectation grew alongside, and ambition came along for the ride. Soon enough, games needed cinematic presentation, seamless worlds, systemic design, and more. The genie was out the bottle, and everything started taking longer to build.
The arrival of x86 come the PS4 and Xbox One, however, removed some hardware friction. Migrating to a PC-like architecture made games easier to develop as studios found themselves already familiar with how it operated. Meanwhile, pre-established toolsets brought efficiency gains, and unified codebases made cross-platform releases more achievable. Game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine eroded technical barriers further, as studios adopted a universal framework which needed minimal adaptation to function smoothly.
“The arrival of x86 come the PS4 and Xbox One, however, removed some hardware friction.”
But, rising expectations still loomed large, from publishers who were requesting even bigger worlds, even sharper fidelity, with more features, more platforms, more content, post-release roadmaps, and so on. And then there’s all the tertiary requirements: community support, creator management, marketing, et cetera. We’re in a climate where expectation occupies many fronts.
The sheer volume of creation has led to one inevitability: bottlenecks. And if we zoom back into game development, comparing and contrasting the then and now, asset production, specifically, has grown exponentially more complex. See, a door used to be just a door. A flat texture, a simple animation, and maybe a loading trigger. Now it needs detail; material texture, lighting consistency, physical interaction, sound design, and more to behave correctly in every possible game state. Likewise, a tree was once a simple background dressing, as was a forest or distant mountain. Now it needs detailed geometry, wind simulation, and optimised draw distance across multiple vantage points. Multiply that across an entire biome, throw in emergent NPC behaviour or dynamic weather, and the scale of modern game development becomes clear. It’s not that the assets are harder to make, it’s that everything is now an asset, and they need to be of tangible high quality at that.
Yet, despite these bottlenecks in the production pipeline, countless AAA experiences – open world games, especially – seldom feel succinct. They’re bloated and long-winded, often trying to merge systems-driven, RPG-like mechanics with cinematic presentation. Now, we’re not steering toward a black and white argument here. It’s not: large open world equals bad. Remember, we’re assessing why so many games take an ice age to develop, so if two different production pipelines run at once – systemic and mechanical design alongside mocap-acted cinematography – then it’s bound to take a long time. Modern AAA development, quite often, isn’t just about making a game but making a movie and simulation simultaneously.
And look, even after all the assets are locked-in there’s still quality assurance to undertake. See, modern games don’t tend to ship on a single platform. They launch across consoles and PC hardware setups, with performance modes, accessibility options, store compliance, and more to account for. Every variable is like a moving target, where a fix in one area could break something in another. Viewing, again, through the lens of AAA design, with open worlds, branching quests, and emergent systems, then there are thousands of possible interactions which need to be tested. It isn’t just about squashing bugs; the bigger and more complex a world becomes, the harder it is to say conclusively that it works.
“Even after all the assets are locked-in there’s still quality assurance to undertake.”
Of course, work of this scale demands enormous budgets. Even games with sales in the millions that we’d otherwise assume were successful can struggle to recoup costs. As a knock-on effect, publishers now think of their shiniest titles in the context of a wider ecosystem, encompassing endless engagement, DLC, subscription-based services, and even cross-media expansion. Take Remedy Entertainment, for instance, whose 2019 release Control had sold upwards of two million units by 2021, yet this wasn’t claimed as a hit by the Finnish outfit. Sales reached four-and-a-half million by 2024, but Remedy had already signed an agreement with Annapurna to fund the game’s sequel, Control Resonant, alongside adapting both Control and Alan Wake to TV and film. This strategic partnership isn’t necessarily about ensuring survival, but it does underline a big-budget game’s need to sustain beyond sales.
Mentioning Remedy is pertinent to this discussion too, as the studio often avoids the long cycles between releases that are hampering the industry elsewhere. Instead, they’ve found a way to move faster. And, they’re not alone either: Insomniac Games, Resident Evil and FromSoftware share the same knack for haste. Delving into why, we can see that they each emphasise the same underlying philosophies for constraint, reuse, and organisational structure.
In Remedy’s case, they control the scope of their experiences tightly, while proprietary game engine Northlight allows them to build multiple projects in parallel without reinventing its tools. Elsewhere, Insomniac Games use a ‘leapfrog’ pipeline with multiple dedicated teams working across overlapping projects, supported by asset reuse and first-party finances. Meanwhile, FromSoftware leans into iteration, reusing core mechanics, animations, and design frameworks while maintaining a flat creative structure which allows for faster decision making.
The unifying theme, however, is discipline. Each of these studios builds on what they’ve already accomplished, avoiding unnecessary sprawl to keep their creative focus narrow enough to develop quickly. In an industry chasing size and breadth, these three studios show that speed comes from knowing what to leave out.
“FromSoftware leans into iteration, reusing core mechanics, animations, and design frameworks while maintaining a flat creative structure which allows for faster decision making.”
Of course, smaller, indie-focused teams avoid gargantuan gaps between releases too, despite using the same tools as their AAA counterparts. And, perhaps owing to more modest budgets and less investor pressure, the indie scene has blossomed into a hotbed of creativity and experimentation. They’re showing conclusively that it isn’t the development tools that are causing mass slowdown, but AAA’s tendency for colossal overreach.
Annual releases, like sports titles, ship quickly too, and interestingly they almost-always rely on trade-offs and constraints, like the trio of studios just-mentioned. Reused assets, recycled animations, and lightly refreshed mechanics ensure these titles hit their periodic release windows, but their iteration is seldom received positively.
If there’s demand for wholesale refresh without lengthy development cycles, then looking ahead, generative AI might unfortunately become more commonplace. It can accelerate asset creation while reducing costs, but it also raises difficult questions around ethics, authorship, and the role of developers themselves. Looking at generative AI from an art perspective, it has potential to hasten creative processes, but there’s widespread worry it’ll be deployed as an expression of creativity itself. If used morally, then faster production is possible.
Ultimately, games aren’t taking longer because developers have become less efficient. They’re taking longer because ambition, expectation, and cost has been spiralling. Development tools continue to improve, but that only pushes targets further away.
How I wish we were still stuck in the good old PS2 era. But then we wouldn’t have the insane graphics and production values that we all crave today, right?
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
