One of the curses of games is that they start to feel “old” quickly; the faster you can develop new content, the better. It is a lot faster to add content with

One of the curses of games is that they start to feel “old” quickly; the faster you can develop new content, the better. It is a lot faster to add content with simpler art (and cheaper, with better consistency, etc. as article says). Now compare something ultra-realistic like FFXV. Undoubtedly cool. Took them 10 years though, and even then they almost released it too soon. Gamers still blew through all available content in no time. Except now, the developers can’t just add a bunch of new stuff in no time: every change has an absurdly-high quality bar to meet. That means extremely high cost, and probably more time spent than they’d like.