THE:MILKMAN
Member
Why not when it takes multiple years to make a game. The things got to have launch titles.
Because they (third parties especially) don't need them so early. Games are mostly made on PC's running Maya and zBrush and other game creation software and most of the heavy lifting is art for characters and environment.
Killzone: SF was largely made in 2.5 years when nobody thought it possible GG could be working on a launch game for PS4 after Killzone 3 launched in March 2011 and DLC in June 2011. ND infamously made U4 almost from scratch in 2 years flat. Also much more extensive use of outsourcing is now used.
We don't know if one of Sony's big AAA teams have a launch PS5 game cooking or if the likes of RaD are making one. They only really need one big game for actual launch and then a few more in the 6-12 month window.
This quote from Herman Hulst talking to Jason Schreier about development time of Horizon tells a lot:
Jason: You guys were in development for six years? Seven years?
Hulst: We started the pitching process late in 2009. So 2010 we started concepting. We should probably acknowledge the fact that for five, six months when we were finishing Killzone: Shadow Fall there was hardly any activity on Horizon: Zero Dawn. I would say all in all about six years, maybe six and a half, is the full production cycle of Horizon: Zero Dawn. So it’s been a very long time. But that’s kind of what you need when you do your first game in a new genre, it’s a new IP, it’s your first open-world game. It takes time. But we didn’t always work on it with a full team—we started with a few guys and scaled that up to maybe 20 people for the first few years. I don’t want to make it sound more expensive than it was.
I bolded the key part. The vast majority of work on the game was done in ~3 years not 6 or 7 I assume after wrapping Killzone: SF.