Are you able to offer any insight into why new games take years, or methods that could speed that up dramatically for those with annual release expectations for instance? Can more staff cut times drastically if it's known a game will pay for itself, or advances in tech such as Unreal 5, or I'm sure Kunos mentioned making their new AC engine so it could be licensed to other devs?
In our comments to their track suggestions I had to suggest how nice large cities could be in Unreal 5 and the amount of opportunities that could bring track-wise. Watched a video of someone re-make LA in 20 minutes, and imagine this will happen at an industrial scale in better detail for the entire industry to licence?
If a dev like Motorsport Games uses their rFactor/KartKraft engine in Unreal 5 should it not mean near clone games with some tweaked handling per discipline could easily be created and rattled out annually?
The biggest time investment I can think of is probably asset production.
Let's take a track for example, as that's usually the biggest single asset type.
Building a track to AAA standards usually takes about a year of man-hours. That includes the onsite research, LIDAR scanning (if available), modelling, licensing, lots and lots of bugtesting etc.
Multiply that across however many circuits there are in the game, and then consider that the look and feel of the game needs to be consistent across all of them too.
Next you have the cars, which on top of the model need licensing (again), audio, physics, setup modifiers, tyre wear, hybrid/electric simulation (if required), cameras, damage, liveries, AI training on every track and much more.
From what I read about other games, a single car at AAA quality takes about 2-3 months of man-hours, so again multiply that by however many cars are in the game.
On top of all this there's all the things to make a game an actual "game" (and not just a bunch of assets you do hotlaps with), like player progression, career, multiplayer, time trial, AI, user interfaces for all of that, QA to ensure it all works etc.
Keep in mind that Straight4 is essentially working from scratch.
Even Motorsport Games (which has its fair share of problems as we've all read about) has previous titles to pull assets, code and experience from, which is why they can spool up development or an engine shift a little quicker.
Once you've
got a finished product, it's easier to iterate on it (look at F1 games), but getting there is the hard part. Apparently
F1 Manager 22 took 4 years to make, but they've now laid the foundations for 23, 24, 25 etc.