It’s not run like the movie industry yet. But, gamedev managers have been trying to push it that way for well over a decade for exactly the reason you mentione

It’s not run like the movie industry yet. But, gamedev managers have been trying to push it that way for well over a decade for exactly the reason you mentioned: It’s really hard to keep a large team busy enough to pay their own salaries all the time. Many people’s jobs are focused on early or late in the process (ex: concept art vs testers). Pipelining multiple games is the obvious solution, but keeping everything lined up is much, much easier said than done in such a chaotic industry. However, the conversion to Hollywood-style waves of contractors hasn’t happened in games largely because the workers aren’t as interchangeable as they are in movies. Game pipelines have been very custom and quirky. It takes a long time to ramp up and get effective at a particular studio. That makes hiring and releasing a whole team for a single project very inefficient. Or, at least it has been that way. All this is a big reason why Unity and Unreal Engine have become so popular. By becoming standardized pipelines, they “make hiring much easier” because new hires can show up already familiar with the engine. Give it another decade and the Hollywoodization of gamedev may yet happen.