Is The Five-Year Development Cycle Sustainable?

Games take a long time to make. They often take a long time to play. And we had all better get used to it. In a recent interview with Axios, Matt Booty, the chief of Xbox Game Studios, said, “I think that the industry and the fans were a little behind the curve on sort of a reset to understand that games aren’t two or three years anymore.” Well, what are they? “They’re four and five and six years.” Got that? Games heave and shunt into place now, like that cargo ship that Activision hired to drift into harbour, at the Port of Long Beach, revealing the artwork for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. That is games now: hulking, slow, and leaky – built for the long haul.

Or, at least, that is blockbuster games now. (The irony being that Call of Duty is one Triple-A series that delivers a fresh entry on an annual basis – though some, after sampling Modern Warfare II, with its leaning on the prix fixe and the prosaic, may dispute the freshness.) For those of us who are, as Booty says, a little behind the curve, this sounds like a drab state of affairs. One could be forgiven for wishing to cut the curve short and reset the understanding entirely. Five years is a long time, in the churn of pop culture; I can’t help but think that, back in 2015, the notion of a Suicide Squad game must have seemed like a novel idea to Rocksteady Studios. Now, however, after eight years and two mouldering movies, that game, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, seems doomed to arrive ready-stale.

What hope for those studios who like to imagine their fingers firmly on the pulse of the public imagination? The most recent big game that seemed truly prescient was Death Stranding, from late 2019. That walkathon presented an apocalyptic vision of folks living in isolation – their spirits quashed by self-imposed quarantine, waiting to be hooked up to their fellow sufferers with a high-speed internet connection. But few can count, as Hideo Kojima can, on the good world to throw up bad dreams and suffuse their creations with grim relevance. The other approach, best exhibited by Rockstar, is to make games with subjects so broad and resonant that you can count on them swinging back into significance, or else never going out of style.

Red Dead Redemption II began development in late 2010 and came out in 2018, but its grand subject happened to be America, and the crude moral health of those that patrolled its frontier. It could have come out in the 1950s and been no less potent. Hence the long and lavish production time, the months of crunch, and the bulk of the end credits. If you command a bottomless budget, why not employ a lead water artist and a lead vegetation artist, the better to make your landscape flow and flourish? Well, one answer might be: the physical and mental strain on your workforce. Another could well be: it might be nice to have more than one game from Rockstar in a decade. Since the release of Grand Theft Auto V, in 2013, Red Dead Redemption II is the only new game we’ve had.

On the other hand, you may relish this approach. Leave it to the juggernaut studios to deliver the lushest vegetation – the kinds of experience that knock the breath out of you with sheer graphical grunt. It isn’t as though we are short of games to play in any given year. The problem arises when you yearn for something. Fans of The Elder Scrolls, for example, have been chewing their nails for another mainline instalment in that series since 2011. The bad news? “We’re talking about a game that’s five-plus years away.” So said Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, this week, during the Free Trade Commission’s current investigation into Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard.

One angle worth considering is that of the creatives. Think of lead vegetation artists the world over, tilling and toiling away on blockbusters; are they happy in the knowledge that their career accomplishments may well be countable on one loamy hand? To say nothing of the fact that these extensive development cycles must surely grind down one’s passion, after a time? Whether or not a five-year development cycle is sustainable will depend on how long we keep buying and playing big games – and expecting those games to politely shove back the generational boundaries and assault us with outrageous detail. There are, however, other possibilities. Consider FromSoftware, which gave us Bloodborne in 2015, Dark Souls III in 2016, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 2019, and Elden Ring just last year.

These punishing adventures favour art direction over graphical fidelity; they are perfectly willing to scar the eye with a scuffed texture or a patch of crummy clipping, as long as it leaves a mark on your memory. Then, of course, there is Insomniac Games, which has released Spider-Man, its sequel Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart all in the span of four years, and is putting out Spider-Man 2 later this year. Perhaps the studio's name is a giveaway. In any event, Booty's comments don't necessarily speak for the entire industry, and there are plenty of players, and developers, who seem happy to stay behind the curve.