How does FromSoftware release AAA games so frequently? Elden Ring boss says "we are just blessed with a great staff" that the studio empowers and retains

For starters they keep making mostly the same game over and over. They're essentially doing the Bethesda shtick except their end results are better. Sticking to stuff that can mostly be made in the same engine as the thing you finished 15 minutes ago is going to shave off a lot of time compared to making a new game.

Of course that's not to shit on incremental improvements or engine reuse or anything. That is just sound thinking as long as the games are good.

Just so surprising that treating staff well and keeping them around lets you do consistently high quality work. Boggles the mind really.

This studio is not just known for an even by Japanese standards exploitative work culture, but it also reuses assets of all kinds far more liberally than other developers. Art is by far the biggest cost factor in games development and they are taking significant shortcuts wherever they can.

They wisely stick to AAA games and avoid the hassle of AAAA games like ubisoft

They also release real products and not "games as a service" shit.

So frequently? Dude it's been like 2 years since they announced DLC for their last game and it's only finally coming this June assuming it does not get delayed.

Japan as a whole is fairly notorious for 24/7 work culture. The way he repeatedly mentions their quick production and pivots feels a bit… crunchy.

The dev team's boss is literally an elden ring boss.

But...they don't? Their mainline games are always a few years apart (with the exception of Bloodborne, which they had a separate team doing concurrently).

Unless you're referring to the other games they publish that no one really knows about or comments on? I don't think Metal Wolf Chaos XD, Déraciné, or Monster Hunter Diary: Poka Poka Airou Village DX should really factor into the discussion.

Are we just going to pretend Armored Core 6 wasn't a development hell for a good while to the point that the original producer left to do Daemon X Machina?

"At the cost of our staffs sanity!"

Massive, massive whips.

I wouldn't say FROM SOFTWARE's games are AAA like other AAA studios.

It's also a Japanese company with Japanese work ethic.

You don't have to actually finish the game when a bunch of marks will treat every bug and inconsistency as some grand difficulty hurdle and some deep lore the normies don't understand