AAA games are currently running on a 6 year cycle and that is too darn long.

Imagine you are a kid who is 13 years old. You get your hands on a video game that you truly love. You play it again and again and hope to one day play its sequel. Next thing you know, you are 19 years old and in college, and they have finally released a sequel. That's great. You try it out, have your fun. Then move on with life. There is a more than 50% chance that you never play the third game in the series, because life went on for you and you decided to invest in a hobby other than video games.

If we are to go by the current video game release cycle, it would take 18 years for you to play through a trilogy of games in a series.

That model is clearly not sustainable in holding a long term audience as nobody is going to be able to hold interest in the series for 18 years.

Even the makers of the new God of War game decided to limit their story to within the span of two games as they didn't want to spread the story across 15 years of development.

The closest thing to sane we have among video game developers in the video game industry is the call of duty franchise where they have three different studios working on the games, releasing one game per year, with each studio getting three years to develop their game, and every year, these games sell tens of millions of copies and make hundreds of millions in profits for the studio.

That is what video games were about at heart. Something new you could play each summer or winter vacation in your favorite series, instead of getting too old to ever finish the story of your games across releases.

Video games today are also suffering from a budget growth crisis, where game budgets for AAA games are beginning to go past the 300+ million mark for multiple AAA games out there. The studios are trying to reign it in, and the most effective way to reign it in would be to lower the development time in the video game industry. Games shouldn't be releasing after more than 3 years and still making a profit. It is pure insanity to have to wait that long to make a profit.

If somebody wants to play Spiderman 3, they will have to wait till 2029 if they are lucky and the studio does not instead work on some other major game in between or has multiple teams to work across different games. That is too darn long a wait for a simple game you are going to play for a week or a month at most.

Uncharted 1, 2, and 3 had a gap of two years between the games in the trilogy. Uncharted 4 took 5 years to develop. Games today are taking almost as long as the amount of time it took to release an entire trilogy two decades ago. There is just too much bloat and it has got to go.

GTA VI got delayed again to fall 2025. That means there is now a gap of 12 years between GTA V and GTA VI. If we count from the beginning, 7 GTA games were released in the same time period since the inception of the GTA series. That's how bad the bloat has gotten. Game development time and bloat has increased 3-7 times since the video game industry started in earnest.

The wait times on video game development are so bad that if they got any worse, video game series will stop making any sense as a concept because the same generation will never get to play two games in a series and each game will be played by the next generation of humans that are born by then.

The game development time bloat isn't just limited to the west either. Black Myth Wukong, one of the best selling games of the year, took 6 years to finish development as well. Baldur's Gate 3, a famous RPG game created by Larian Studios from Belgium, took 7 years to finish development on the game. The game Deadlock by Valve, is said to have been in development for 8 years and still hasn't fully released so far. These are absolutely unsustainable numbers.

Currently there is no AAA studio out there except the creators of Call of Duty who have an actual handle on the bloat. Video game consoles such as the playstation generally have a life cycle of 7 years, which means that you will never get to play two games from the same series on the same console unless the game is developed to be backwards compatible with the older generation consoles.

That is how bad the current game development cycle is, you get to play a game on the ps4, its sequel on the ps5, and its sequel on the ps6, having to wait an entire console generation before you get to play the next game in the series.

This isn't even the worst of it. Even the studios developing the games don't want to make the sequel for a game because they don't want to get stuck inside the same game franchise for more than a decade of non-stop game development. Things are so bad right now that a triple AAA developer might end up spending there entire career having only worked on 2-3 game series a most. Nothing about the current model is sustainable.

The fact that sony is still a profitable game studio boggles the mind.

The worst part is that things are pretty much guaranteed to stay this way and get even worse over time. Avatar 2 took 10 years to finish development and made a profit, so precedence exists for media and entertainment objects taking a decade or more to develop and still make a profit. Meaning that we can continue to expect the AAA video game cycle to extend to a decade and beyond in the future. Case in point, GTA VI which is guaranteed to make a profit.

In the case of a game like GTA VI you can at least state that the graphics look next level when compared to the predecessor in the series, but for many games that are taking 5-7 years to develop a sequel, the quality of the game looks iterative and far too similar to the predecessor rather than something revolutionary. Spiderman 2 for example when compared to Spiderman 2018 does not look like the kind of upgrade that can be justified by 100s of millions of dollars of additional funding that was needed to finish developing the game.

A similar case can also be made for the call of duty series in recent years where the Modern Warfare remake sequels all look iterative rather than upgrades over one another, making any increases in budget feel pointless. Video game technology and quality of games released is simply not scaling up with the increase in video game budgets and cost of development in the same time frame.

In the long run if things keep on like this we are going to end up with video games with development budgets of one billion dollars or more.

Already there are three games out there that have cost more than 500 million USD to develop. Genshin Impact, Star citizen, and Monopoly Go! With how current day budgets are ballooning, one could even believe the 1 billion dollar development cost rumors about the development of GTA VI.

Long story short, the upper end of AAA game development budgets is going towards the billions and the development time is beginning to reach up to a decade per game which is not sustainable unless every triple A game is blockbuster hit. At the rate things are going we are about to reach a point where a game has to sell 10 million copies just to break even and even most triple A games out there are actually not capable of reaching his number. The current model of video game development is thus becoming unsustainable and we need to find a way to go back to the good old days of game releases every two years somehow. The existence of Unreal Engine 5 isn't helping decrease the development times to 2-3 year cycles but maybe the next generation of game engines hopefully will. Maybe once we have truly reached the end point of chasing improved game graphics and details, the only thing that could be done would be to shorten development times to keep the audience entertained.