Death Stranding came out in 2019. Death Stranding 2 will come out in 2025. That’s six years for two games. If these were the PS2 days Kojima would have cranked out 3 Death Stranding games by now and we’d be getting Death Stranding 3: Subsistence along with a teaser for Death Stranding 4 next year.
Remember when video game trilogies used be to a huge thing in the sixth and seventh generations? You’d typically get 3 games in about 5-7 years
See: Halo, Gears of War, Resistance, Killzone, etc
It’s not that hard to pinpoint the problem. The problem is capitalism.
I think about this a lot. So much time is wasted due to bullshit like copyright laws. Imagine if all games were open source and you could copy+paste assets, then focus on changing things to match your gameplay/artistic style/whatever. Instead, games have to be built from the ground up because no one shares their progress. Despite every game having something like trees, each game has to waste time programming trees, sculpting trees, making tree textures, and so on and so forth.
What if instead you could just download the tree file everyone has worked on, added more to it if you wanted, then re-upload the tree file for someone else to use? Now you have multiple iterations of the tree with varying levels of fidelity and no known bugs for the Generic Gaming Program.
The closest we have to this are various game engines like Source and Unreal. But even those have limitations because the companies working on them don’t share with each other (it’d turn into a monopoly and made illegal). And of course this could apply to any field, from automotives to food products.
I’m sure I’m just describing Dengism or some shit but I’m too much of a lib that hasn’t read enough theory to realize smarter people than I am wrote books about this decades ago and it’s foundational to multiple schools of communist thought.