Replies

Join the conversation

Send your questions, comments, and rants to [email protected].

Drip-Feed Development

In the Xbox 360 & PS3 era, developers like Rockstar and Naughty Dog were putting out four to five games in one generation. Now from both of those developers, we are lucky to be getting one game a generation. What does the Game Informer team think caused these huge changes in development timelines?  – headlesssamurai via BlueSky

The short answer is that expectations have skyrocketed alongside the implementation of advanced technology. The shift seemed to happen around the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation, with franchises from the studios you named (and many others) kicking off an arms race as triple-A developers tried to one-up one another and deliver the most visually stunning, immersive games on the market. While it makes sense that, as technology has improved, the work required to make these massive, high-fidelity games, as we see from Rockstar and Naughty Dog, is much more intensive, you can likely trace the trends of ballooning budgets and expanded timelines to the root cause of why so many studios are struggling.