Over at the weblog of Treyarch producer Stuart Roch, there's an interesting discussion sparked by Fumito Ueda's DICE speech on Shadow Of The Colossus, and touching on the issue of development time for video games.

Roch notes that "it took them four years to develop both ICO and Shadow of the Colossus respectively", and it got them to "an average review score of 91.05% collectively", and wonders: "Granted, it’s a bit of a stretch to make a simple correlation between more development time and higher quality product based on this tiny product sample, but I have to admit, there is certain attractiveness to the argument. Can it be that in a given number of development cycles, those that had more time with less resources would create better games than those that had short dev cycles with monster teams?"

You can read more about the DICE lecture from sister site Gamasutra's write-up, but this is an intriguing point - Roch argues: "Emotionally I hate the feeling that as a business we’re more consistently staffing larger and larger teams to do mad crunches to the finish line over smaller teams who have more time to do proper pre-production, prototype, be creative and iterate."