Isn’t that something to do with Rockstar having basically unlimited resources? They’re at a point now where people are guaranteed to buy their games and therefore they can afford to make them extremely polished. So that’s great but it’s a very unique position built up over a long time.
Unfortunately that sort of thing doesn’t work all the time. But when it does work, it’s great. I think the last example of a crippling amount of polish being out to a game and it paying off has been Baldur’s Gate 3.
Yes. There's zero chance a new studio can build something of the scale and ambition of a modern GTA/RDR. Firstly, you won't get the funding, it's too big a risk, so you need a track record of massive success behind you to fund it.
Secondly, you need the team. You need a whole organisation of thousands of people that has grown organically and learned how to collaborate over extended periods of time and has all the technology, processes, and culture in place to get a game of that scale out the door.
Take a look at SC for an example of what happens when you spin up a new team and try to make something spectacular. It's a great effort, but it should be obvious from their time lines how challenging it is to build something of that scale. If they hadn't managed to tap this rich vein of wealthy space nerds to keep throwing money at them, they'd have gone bankrupt many times over, and are still years away from shipping.
Successes like BG3 come from successful teams that have built up over time.
The games industry is going through a phase where it grew massively and lots of fresh people joined and lots of new teams started up...... and many of them are failing because making games is really bloody hard and it takes a long, long time to build an effective team to get a modern AAA title out the door, and there are quite a lot of people that have been promoted into leadership positions they simply aren't cut out for, to be frank.
