Triple-A games such as Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and Borderlands take many years to develop. While the average fan is willing to put up with the wait between releases (the complexity of open worlds obviously requires tremendous effort to bring to life), Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick suggests that could be changing.
Zelnick acknowledged the gaps between major releases while speaking with GamesIndustry.biz and admitted that he thought eight years (e.g., the period between RDR and RDR 2) was too long. A possible solution would be smaller releases fleshed out with additional DLC down the line.
“It’s possible that games may be a bit shorter than they were in certain instances,” Zelnick says. “It’s possible that the ability to deliver content on an ongoing basis for a long time after an initial release of a hit would mean that perhaps that initial release wouldn’t be as long in terms of number of hours of gameplay as previously had been demanded in a world where that was all you were getting.”