I do think this is fundamentally still a problem of corporate structure rather than simply the size.
Control for example, is definitely one of the more experimental games that artistically pushed the envelope while still being pretty AAA in terms of budget, and its developer Remedy had nearly 400 employees. So to cope with the size of the project as well as the development team, they had 3 creative directed all working on the same game, and all 3 of them contributed greatly to the game’s incredible artistic vision.
I think the bigger problem nowadays is how many companies with nearly 400 people, would be willing to let only 3 people to entirely dictate the artistic vision of the entire project, without considering it too much of a risk to take.
And conveniently bumping up the game’s minimal system requirement from what was more reasonable to straight up requiring at least RTX4090 in terms of both ray tracing compute cost, and hard VRAM requirement, possibly by design.
No wonder Nvidia loves pushing this so much lol
Why would anyone care about it anyway, when it was still fundamentally decades old games under all the shiny graphics at this point?
And how long it took that sized team to make Factorio?
Oh right, 8.5 years, from the first concept prototype, to the official version 1.0 full release, according to the dev themselves: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-360
I think you actually just illustrated exactly OP’s point with your exceptionally poor example here, Factorio is absolutely an outlier in every way, including how it literally started a whole new genre, which absolutely does NOT happen with the majority of video games ever developed.
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