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by dangus 494 days ago
> Most published commercial games were made by a single 14 to 20 year old in few months.

This isn't really true. Yes, some games were made hastily like that, like E.T. for Atari.

Just one cherry-picked example, The Legend of Zelda for NES was made in about 2 years with 9 people in the credits.

Some popular modern indie games with similar team sizes and development schedules include:

Valheim, which went from full time development in 2018 to early access release in 2021 with a team of two.

Stardew Valley's initial development (not an early access game) took four years with a single developer.

Rimworld took one year for an alpha build, and about 5 more years to full release with 2-3 developers.

Minecraft/Infiniminer took about 2 years to reach a release version, with Notch handing off development to Jeb and Mojang only growing to a larger development team post-Microsoft acquisition.