Matt Booty says people need to understand the longer development times of modern productions.
Grilled Matt Booty A meeting in which he minced no words to discuss the development times of modern titles, especially those that matter with a big budget. The executive establishes that “people have to understand that games are no longer made in two or three years, but rather take four, five and even six”.
This trend towards increased production times became more apparent between the Xbox 360 and Xbox One generations. Without going any further, the 360 had Gears of War, Halo Reach, Halo 3 and Halo 4 while the frequency of titles on the One was much lower.
More budget, more development time
Subscribe to the GX channel on Youtube
It is also true that there are annual franchises such as Assassin’s Creed (or almost annual if we take into account this last time), Call of Duty or FIFA but in general these IPs work in collaboration with different studios and with very similar structural models that allow deliveries with few innovations or modifications year after year.
If we focus on the specific case of Bethesda, Fallout 3 was released in 2008, this was followed by a year of expansions to launch in 2011 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It wasn’t until 2015 that the fourth numbered episode of Fallout would arrive to now introduce the towering Starfield which would land in a few months while working on The Elder Scrolls 6 (announced in 2018).