In general it's developement hell symptoms, ideas change thus everything is redone multiple times.

Because devs aren't robots who start making a new game the moment they ship one, and because Ubisoft and Sega are much bigger companies with way more staff that are working on various projects

Smaller team, less copy and paste.

Development takes time. ideas change over time, and slowly coalesce into one big idea.

Ok so firstly you'd be surprised by how long it takes to make a game.

There are the famous ones, Starfield for example took over 7 years to make, Diablo III was in development for 11 years, LA Noire took 7, Spore took 8, the original Prey took over a decade if you can believe that. That's just off the top of my head. Lots of smaller indie projects take 5+ years to make despite only having 10-15 hours of gameplay (or less). Most of the games you enjoy indeed take a minimum of 5 years to make.

Secondly, don't use ♥♥♥♥♥ Ubisoft as an example of how to do it well. Yes they do have exceptional development turn around. However, they are also the model of what is wrong with AAA game development. A company who regurgitate out mediocre wank designed purely to make profit and capitalise on brand recognition and have very little, to no interest in advancing the medium (not necessarily as individuals working on those games, but certainly in their company ethos). They have mutiple teams teams working on those games franchises that contain several hundred people per team, so when one Ass Creed or Far Cry is released another team is already working on the next. There are very few studios in the world that can compare to Ubisoft in terms of the resources they dedicate to getting their games out on the regular, or indeed in terms of how ♥♥♥♥♥ disinterested I am in those games.

Many companies get significantly into development and choose to push a reset because they feel that they have gone down a wrong path and need to backtrack. This is normal. Ubisoft don't, they just release it and hope you pay for it despite it being unfinished and or poorly designed.

Also, as somebody who tracks a lot of games, I can tell you thousands of games come out a year. A dozen or so games release most days on steam alone. If you have ran out of things to play frankly you must be doing it wrong.

Compulsion was also releasing DLC for We Happy Few around mid-2019, so it's more likely to say that actual development work on South of Midnight didn't occur until late-2019/early-2020.

Hi Shredder;

As Santa Claus and JohnnyMaverick pointed out, we started working on South of Midnight after we finished releasing the DLCs for We Happy Few, around the start of 2020. Larger teams who make games at a cadence, like Ubisoft on the AC series, almost always have several teams working in parallel. As a smaller studio, we mostly concentrate only on one project at a time. We also strive to get better with every new IP we make, and that requires retraining and gathering additional expertise during each cycle.

Hope that helps,
Guillaume.

Ηi! Yes so it is as i expected. Because you are a small studio! Yes now i understnd why it took so much just for a new game Other small games companies takr many years for one game. Like id software for exampke who releases a DOOM game each 4+ years

The company was brought to Microsoft after WHF, so they probably had financial trouble and had to reestructure.