I don't really know where you get your information from, but with a good team of developers you can have a game developed from scratch to a playable state within a year. Most of the time goes not into coding, but into art and bug testing (although I question the latter lately.) That doesn't include games that are being developed on an existing engine. The irony of the games industry is that their model is so inefficient, so stupid, that it can literally take less time to build a skyscraper than it does to release a game.
If their pricing is based on some notion of time it takes to produce, then doesn't that encourage them to be slow to market? Especially if they're someone like EA and have a huge marketing machine to drive hype.
Someone down below said that most games are designed with 40hrs of gameplay in mind, I have yet to see one that wasn't an RPG or RTS with that number in mind. I can't even think of an FPS with even 20hrs of solid gameplay off the top of my head (and by solid I mean actual story mode and not just a horribly cheating AI.)
The problem with the games industry is that they really don't care about how games play, but more about how they can hype them based on how pretty they are.
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I don't really know where you get your information from, but with a good team of developers you can have a game developed from scratch to a playable state within a year. Most of the time goes not into coding, but into art and bug testing (although I question the latter lately.) That doesn't include games that are being developed on an existing engine. The irony of the games industry is that their model is so inefficient, so stupid, that it can literally take less time to build a skyscraper than it does to release a game. If their pricing is based on some notion of time it takes to produce, then doesn't that encourage them to be slow to market? Especially if they're someone like EA and have a huge marketing machine to drive hype. Someone down below said that most games are designed with 40hrs of gameplay in mind, I have yet to see one that wasn't an RPG or RTS with that number in mind. I can't even think of an FPS with even 20hrs of solid gameplay off the top of my head (and by solid I mean actual story mode and not just a horribly cheating AI.) The problem with the games industry is that they really don't care about how games play, but more about how they can hype them based on how pretty they are.