It’s honestly kinda crazy how long some games spend in development. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is a perfect example of something that should’ve been quick but ended up being so bloated and took forever to make.
FF7Remake was announced in 2015, got stuck in development hell for a bit, released 2020. The sequel released 2024. The third one still hasn’t been teased yet. How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story? I loved the first remake but dropped the second one, I just didn’t care about the story as much as I did ~5 years ago.
Every era of video games was affected by its business model. Games used to be far more obtuse to sell guides and hint hotlines, and they used to be hard to the point that they were less fun so that it took longer to finish them. In the early 2000s, when the industry was largely between alternate revenue streams, you tended to get a lot of padding so that they could put a larger number of levels as a bullet point on the back of the box, so the first few levels would be great, but somewhere in the middle, they’d be pretty phoned in.