From Jason Schreier. “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’,” but this is some analysis from Schreier seemingly rooted in many anecdotes. The long and short of it is that development on AAA games tend to routinely hit bottlenecks where entire portions of a team are waiting for some other team to unblock them so that they can continue to get work done.
To me, what I dislike the most about the direction the industry is going is that consolidating more resources into fewer megagames means there’s less room for experimental side projects and spinoffs. I especially miss all the kinds of B-games that used to go straight to handheld. Of course part of the reason they disappeared because we don’t have handhelds to put them on, but I think that half the reason handhelds died was because publishers weren’t going to make handheld games for much longer anyway.