Just because a game has been in development for 10 years doesn't mean it had as many people working on it the whole time. What games came out before GTA 6 from the same devs? I seem to recall Red Dead Redemption 2, one of their biggest games yet, and while not as spectacular or big there were also the updates and added content to GTA 5 over the years that is still being added. GTA 6 got the teams from RDR2 to work on it now, which is going to speed up development.
As far as the workloads go, teams of a couple hundred people who have probably been doing their various parts of a game's development for several years is going to make the workload lighter and more spread out through experience and manpower. A team of 20-30 people making a game like WL are going to have a bigger workload and more to do especially as more of the game is made and shipped out, not to mention they also need to listen to what their patreon backers want so they can actually have the funding to make the game, compared to Rockstar who have astronomically higher budgets for their games without having to rely on people basically donating money (though they do make a good bit from microtransactions like the GTA5 shark cards).
WL is making progress, you can see what is being done by simply going to the game's discord or looking at the patreon, or asking Steve himself since he watches this thread.
Yes, Red Dead Redemption 1 was released in 2010 and the second in 2018, so the second opuus took 8 years to develop. The second opus was much more imposing and contained more things to do, the story was longer. It has sold 57 million copies worldwide and is one of the world's best-selling games.
The team that developed RDR 2 is not the same team that developed GTA 5 and GTA 6. Big studios like Rockstar Games have several teams working simultaneously on their own games.
The game broke several records and enjoyed the second-biggest launch in entertainment history, generating $725 million in sales on its opening weekend and surpassing Red Dead Redemption's lifetime sales in two weeks.
The workload is determined by several factors, not just by the number of people working on the game. It depends on many things, some of which we don't know.
For example, the studio's internal policy, the developers' working hours, their working conditions, their health, the studio's finances and the funds allocated to development, the quality of the hardware, etc.
I suspect that WL's studio doesn't have the same finances and the same number of people, but the game started development in 2017, and we're in 2024. So 7 years have already gone by, which is almost the same number of years it took to develop RDR 2 and GTA 5.
I've been following the development of Wild Life for a long time, and with each update I re-download the game here on F95, I'm also on Discord and Patreon, and I can assure you that the game hasn't been moving forward for at least a year and a half.
There are minor additions, but one wonders what their priorities are, because adding clothes, new characters and sexual animations are not the priority when a game is far from finished and has been in development for 7 years. Unless it's in the final stages of development, which is clearly not the case.
It seems that the studio is deliberately stagnating, releasing updates to act as a "hello, we're still alive, look we're still releasing updates whose sole purpose is to keep you waiting while you continue to shell out money on Patreon; so we can continue to rake in easy money without advancing our game."
