How Many Years Does It Take To Develop A AAA Game?
Good morning everyone. A rare occasion is upon us: I’ve somehow been inspired to write two posts in the same month. Whether that means next month’s entry is doomed remains to be seen, but given that it’s the holiday season, I may be a little occupied anyway.
On Sunday night, I ended up in a lengthy conversation about the current state of AAA games and the time it takes to make them. It all started with a post from someone annoyed that Naughty Dog’s upcoming Intergalactic is only the studio’s second release this generation, and that this is, apparently, some kind of scandal.
We’re in an unusual moment for gaming. We’ve never had such steady access to great new releases, but we’ve also never had to wait this long for them. This year alone we’ve had Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Death Stranding 2, and plenty of others proving the post-COVID drought is finally behind us. And yet the constant complaint that Grand Theft Auto 6 is taking “too long” never seems to die.
So the real question is: is it actually taking too long?
GTA 6 was only confirmed to be in development in 2022, with the trailer arriving in 2023. Contrast that with Cyberpunk 2077, which took seven full years between its announcement and its botched launch. And now we’ve just seen (what I believe to be) the extremely early announcement of The Witcher 4, which I don’t expect to release before 2028.
The sixth main entry in what might be the quintessential video game franchise feels like an especially long wait because, in most people’s minds, it was practically confirmed the moment GTA V launched on September 17th, 2013. In that sense, it’s easy to understand why the lead-up to GTA 6 feels less like a three-year wait and more like twelve.
But we shouldn’t ignore (and far too many people do) Rockstar’s 2018 release of Red Dead Redemption 2, arguably the studio’s masterpiece. Once you factor that in, even the supposed twelve-year gap shrinks into a far more reasonable seven.
The fact of the matter is that games this big just take that long now, and if studios aimed to release them without crunch or any kind of developer abuse, those timelines could easily stretch to a full decade. That said, the idea that every project follows the same pattern is simply not true. Horizon Forbidden West arrived five years after the first game. The follow-up to Ghost of Tsushima arrived on a similar schedule. On the Xbox side, Forza Horizon last released in 2021 and its sixth entry is expected next year. Other Xbox franchises have been less predictable, with The Outer Worlds taking seven years between entries, though it did receive plenty of post-launch content to fill the gap. Meanwhile, Doom has managed three major releases in nine years, which is a surprisingly fast pace given the state of the industry.
This brings us back to Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic, which finds itself in a strange spot. Currently expected to release in 2027 (and definitely not sooner), Intergalactic will be the studio’s first new release since 2020’s monumental, and admittedly controversial, The Last of Us Part II. The reason it feels so far away is simple: fans are exhausted with Naughty Dog’s behavior over the last five years.
Since 2020, the studio has put out Part I (a remake of a remaster), Part II Remastered (a remaster), Part I Remastered (a remaster of a remake of a remaster), the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (a collection of remasters), and a handful of other rereleases in the manner of PC ports. It has reached a level of genuine absurdity. The fact that they poured development resources into a parade of remasters instead of focusing on delivering a new IP is baffling.
All of this is happening right after the cancellation of their planned live service game set in The Last of Us universe. And for what it is worth, I personally suspect that that project was shaping up to be an extraction shooter and cancelled to make way for Bungie’s inbound Marathon (we are not talking about Marathon again, I promise).
This is a far cry from Naughty Dog’s PlayStation sister studio Insomniac Games. They’ve been leading the charge on Sony’s ninth-generation hardware with Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Spider-Man Remastered, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Spider-Man 2, and next year’s Wolverine, all within a six-year window. Moreover, they’re also rumored to be developing a Venom spin-off (projected for 2027) and Spider-Man 3, and if earlier leaks still hold, they’re expected to eventually deliver a full X-Men game and eventually return to Ratchet and Clank (by, I imagine, 2032).
Naughty Dog, however, is neither Insomniac nor are they insomniacs. Their history has always been built on pushing hardware and technology to their absolute limits, starting back in 1996 with the release of the then unfathomable Crash Bandicoot. That philosophy has carried through every generation. The Last of Us Part 2 featured technology so demanding it put most players’ PS4s on life support. Intergalactic will probably turn the PS5 into part of your home HVAC system, and it takes years to build something like that while stopping short of turning the console into a thermite grenade.
I’m not in the business of making excuses for a billion dollar anything, but from a business perspective, most AAA studios are expected to reinvent themselves every single time. When they do not, they get torn apart for being lazy or leaning too hard on the strength of the IP to mask iterative releases. Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and the parade of annual sports titles are usually the punching bags for that. Even Battlefield, Call of Duty’s main competitor, shifted from a yearly cycle in the sixth generation to a three year cycle in the eighth. It still ended up releasing its reinventing Battlefield 6 four years after its predecessor, and that only happened because EA turned nearly every team outside of its sports division into a Battlefield support unit.
To put it plainly, the best turnaround you can hope for on a modern AAA sequel requires a team of around a thousand developers, not counting contractors. It is a completely ridiculous development model, and it is not good, but it is the reality. Moreover, the response to Battlefield 6 has only cemented that longer development times and scaled up teams are worth the investment. Battlefield 6 is the highest selling shooter of 2025 by a wide margin, while Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is facing what is probably the franchise’s worst launch ever. Carrot, meet stick.
To shift gears pretty abruptly, it’s worth looking at the AA space, which has grown in a huge way this generation despite what social media might have you believe. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of smaller titles have taken center stage this year, and that’s reflected both in The Game Awards nominations and in Metacritic’s highest reviewed games of 2025.
I think the real issue for most people isn’t that we aren’t getting great games often enough. It’s that the series we grew up with, the ones that used to drop new installments every year or two, now take nearly a decade between entries. Without trying to sound patronizing, it’s entitlement. You could absolutely spend the wait playing the endless list of open world games that have been released since 2013, or dive into something new, or pick up something smaller, or explore something from outside the US. But most people don’t actually want to do that. They want to feel what they felt as kids and they want the return of the games that gave them that feeling in the first place.
I’m not saying that to mock anyone, because I fall into the same trap. But it’s the truth. You don’t want good games, you want games from franchises you already know are good. And the list of games that genuinely fit into the former category is exponentially longer than the list that fits into the latter.
It’s the pull of brand equity and personal investment. As games get more expensive, people are far less willing to spend $70 on something they might not enjoy. Services like Game Pass have reinforced this, encouraging fleeting engagement over actual ownership. Despite the noise about how saturated Game Pass is, the IPs that appear there rarely reach the heights they once did, and it too often feels like a graveyard where new IPs go to die. I’ve written on this before, and my take has not changed. In fact, it has only been reinforced as Microsoft falls into the exact patterns I expected. For more context, you can check that piece.
All in all, I don’t feel like I’m waiting too long between games. There is more than enough out there, and only a few brief moments have left me feeling like I had nothing to play. Even then, that was probably more about temporary apathy or not wanting to spend $70 on something new than any real shortage. In any case, GTA 6 is coming next year, and this year alone we’ve had feudal Japanese GTA 6, space-faring GTA 6, FedEx GTA 6, and even Zombie GTA 6. By the time the main release arrives, we’ll have several more GTA-style experiences to keep us busy. Development times have become long, grueling, and often downright abusive for everyone involved, but right now is a perfect time to play literally fucking anything else.
Comments
Post a Comment