Video games are absurdly complicated, and the fact any get made at all is a miracle. That being said, it still shouldn’t take 12 years for one of the biggest triple-A studios in the world to make a sequel.
Grand Theft Auto 5 came out Sept. 17, 2013. I was still doing my A-levels when it launched. Since then I’ve obtained two film degrees, a career in video game journalism, and depression (unrelated to the career). We’ve gone up two console generations, two more GTA 5 launches, and six Skyrim ports. It’s now Dec. 5, 2023, and we’ve just had the first official trailer for GTA 6, due to launch in two years, on a console generation that will then be four to five years old, likely over halfway through their lifecycles.
A girl born on the day GTA 5 launched will be Batmitzvah when the sequel comes out in 2025. After watching the trailer that leaked and then got released ahead of schedule, I can see that a lot of time and effort has gone into creating one of the most realistic-looking games ever made, but is the pursuit of visual fidelity worth it when Rockstar has only developed two new games since 2013?
This isn’t a new issue, or one exclusive to Rockstar. As games become more complicated they take longer to make. All my favorite childhood studios are taking longer to release things. Naughty Dog’s releases have slowed right down, as have Criterion’s and Bethesda’s. Insomniac is one of the few triple-A studios still putting out hits in quick succession, and I’ve no idea how it manages it. I pray its staff aren’t being crunched to hell.
Stacey Henley at TheGamer wrote about modern game development being unsustainable, and she’s right, but things don’t need to be this way. Indie dev Xalavier Nelson founded Strange Scaffold and is “creating structures to build games better, faster, cheaper, and healthier than the industry assumes is possible.” Since 2021, it’s developed six games, and they’ve all been bangers. The newest release, El Paso, Elsewhere has especially blown up. Of course, this is just one studio, but it shows that things can be different; we can have smaller games that still rock.
What developer would want to spend 12 years on a single project? Very few, I’d imagine. As a creative, it’s fun moving on to new projects. While I’m proud of my long-form pieces, by the end of a months-long reporting process I’m sick of them. I want the next shiny, new thing to focus on. Ridley Scott has made eight films in the time it’s taken Rockstar to make two games, and Greta Gerwig’s made three movies in just six years.
The only upside I can see in the pursuit of visual fidelity is that it will one day be perfect and the industry will move on. Eventually, game graphics will be utterly indistinguishable from real life or cinema, but by that point will games take 20 years to make?
