yeah this is another discourse post but this is more some general thoughts about the whole situation and, indeed, some pushback against the idea that maybe games shouldn't take 4+ years to develop
like people are posting the image. you know the one. this one
it's a sentiment I generally agree with, but I feel the general discourse of "no game should take more than X amount of years to finish" unfairly flattens both a lot of the reasons these things happen to different groups and also a lot of the differing effects that long dev times have on these groups. but like, first off, I'm gonna go ahead and say that it's 100% the case that the AAA industry's chasing of bombast and extreme scale and technological advances in a sort of arms race that made this inevitable
and that's bad
like that shouldn't be happening, but it is, and I feel like if I tried to get into all the factors directly tied to capitalism's turgid boner for infinite growth that lead to this that I'd be typing this rambling post out until the heat death of the goddamn universe. but yes, AAA games have a fucking problem and we've seen costs balloon for both development and marketing basically since AAA games became a thing. the AAA games industry is a fucking nightmare that chews people who work on games up and spits them out, sometimes killing them in the process. burnout is so prevalent that oftentimes it happens even before people are just pushed out of their jobs because of layoff cycles
we can't solve AAA games with "shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less" because the issues are dramatically more structural than that. even if those things happened, there's still the way the industry itself functions that absolutely fucking ruins people. long dev cycles are only one part of this! the games industry needs to be destroyed before we can talk about any of this shit
but don't get it twisted! I think long dev cycles are murder!! again, sometimes literally!!! trying to manage a project that is expected to take 4+ years? there's only so far you can take "crunch is a failure of management" before we have to start addressing how managing something of that length is going to start breaking down, especially with massive productions! eventually you are dealing with tech debt. eventually you are dealing with cruft. eventually you are dealing with the fact that a game that is being worked on by 100+ people is going to have the usual turnover but also lose people because of burnout from that single project going on for so long!
eventually you are dealing with the fact that so many things have changed because it's been so long that any management expectations you had going in are going to be substantially different from what you need to get the game out the door
we can not have games that take so long to produce that these things become issues but the industry is fundamentally geared against anything else.
the games industry needs to be destroyed before we can talk about any of this shit
but there's another angle to this and I think it's one that people are kinda not considering. indie games have dramatically different (and, in fact, wider ranging) dev cycles and production processes. indie devs crash out of games for different reasons, under different conditions. they're similar, sure, but they're different enough!
a lot of indie games have 4+ year dev times. sometimes they have 10+ year dev times! it's reasonable to say that most indie devs will release a single commercial game and then never make another and there's loads of reasons for that! a lot of the time these aren't even related to burnout!
indie devs don't have hundreds of millions of dollars of resources behind them. sometimes they don't even have hundreds of just regular dollarsof resources behind them. eventually they release a game and see as the thing they put loads of work into manage to cover maybe a couple month's rent if they're lucky and come to the depressing realization that gamedev is probably better treated as a hobby than something to make money off of because these games will rarely ever pay for their own development, let alone become something that would be a viable third job, let alone first or second
indie dev's a real shit, y'know?
and yeah, a lot burn out too! a lot burn out from overwork, and that can happen even on shorter projects because a lot of indies are honestly pretty bad at project and time management! a lot of us are workaholics! we do stupid shit like work on things for a billion hours at a time or get so obsessed with a single bug that we tunnel in on it or get bogged down in aethetic details before we even have a functioning prototype! we're not great at this! we should be legally assigned producers the moment we even breathe the words "I have an idea for a game"
indie burnout happens, very often, for entirely different reasons than AAA burnout, just as our projects can run longer for different reasons. sometimes a game takes a long time to make because it's something that's being made in spare time while working on another job, sometimes it's because we can't manage our time effectively, sometimes it's because we're dealing with game scope that just can't really fall into a shorter dev cycle when there's maybe (if you're fucking LUCKY) a dozen people working on the game, all of who likely have other jobs
and indie burnout is real! indie financial crash out is real! but the way these things manifest and their causes really aren't always related to the time spent on a single project. indie dev can and usually is a lot more forgiving than hypercapitalism motivated AAA dev, the kind of situation where "crunch isn't mandatory" but cultures are built around encouraging overwork regardless, where 60+ hour weeks become the norm at some point
the discourse around game production length is flattening so many conditions and so many effects of dev length and I get that's a thing that always happens with discourse, but like goddamn
