Indie game legend Jonathan Blow highlights one of the key issues with bloated game development times

Why does every game take seven years to make? I'm not really sure, but it's a trend many of us have noticed, and few of us are happy with. If you're excited for a sequel to release of a game you loved, you have to prepare yourself for the fact that sequel likely won't be out until it's a new decade, especially these days.

It's something indie game veteran and Braid creator Jonathan Blow said recently on social media, highlighting that games taking so long to make can cause problems beyond testing people's patience. "Games take so long to make now, sometimes you can tell the major creative decisions were made 5 years ago," he wrote.

This tweet was posted shortly following the end of the PlayStation State of Play last night, which means it could be referring to one of the games shown in that presentation. In the comments, a lot of people have taken the tweet to mean that culturally, things have changed, so there are "woke" elements in games even though they often ends up sparking massive debates with the worst sides of the internet.

It doesn't seem like that's exactly what Blow is referring to, though. As a veteran of game design, we'd imagine he means that the trends we see from games that are coming out now show what players were asking for and into five years ago. There's no further clarification at the time of writing, but when we look at recent AAA trends, you start to see that a lot of what was popular a while ago is still being thrown at us, with the intent to hop on a bandwagon that already left long ago.