There's also the dynamic of feeling the need to do more, having learned from previous mistakes. My employer's first hit game was shipped in 5 weeks by one full

There's also the dynamic of feeling the need to do more, having learned from previous mistakes. My employer's first hit game was shipped in 5 weeks by one full-time programmer and one full-time artist. It took three years to become what it is now. Now, when we start a new game, we worry about over-the-air downloads and updates. We think about monetization. We work with testing partners. We need privacy policies. We need Facebook integration. We need localization (English, French, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish). And on and on ... None of this is explained by a growing team, nor by outsiders brining in their biases. Instead, we feel we need to do more to avoid the mistakes we made in the past. Is this a maladaptive, or is it a realization of the scope of the problems we're trying to solve? No one dies if we ship a brutal crash and data corruption bug. I love rapid prototyping, but I think new-space is realizing that rapid development means $100M, not $10M invested.