Why Game Development Takes So Much Longer Than People Expect
Major game delays are common and often frustrating for players. Here's what actually makes development take so long.
Modern game development involves coordinating programming, art, sound, writing, and testing across a large team, and a delay or problem in any one of these areas can hold up the entire project's release.
Where time actually goes
A large portion of development time goes into iteration, building a feature, playtesting it, and reworking it based on what didn't feel right, often multiple times over, rather than simply implementing a fixed design document exactly as originally planned.
Why testing and polish take so long specifically
Thoroughly testing a large, complex game across many different hardware configurations and finding the countless small bugs and balance issues that only surface through extensive play takes considerably longer than most players expect, which is a major reason final polish phases run long.