Games that went “Missing in Action!” went –

Game development is enormously complex, as we know by now. This is often emphasized by both the ordinary employees of a given studio and the greedy executives at the top of the pyramid, who know exactly how many employees it takes to complete even small game projects and how much budgets have increased in just 10 years.

So it is even more surprising that games can end up in so-called “development hell,” that they can either be plagued by the studios behind them, only to disappear many, many years in a row without any real signs of life from production. Who pays the salaries? What do daily production meetings look like for game projects that have been going on for 6 years? 7 years? 10 years? “So, how far along are we with features X and Y?”

It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? But it really does happen. It happens that games that have taken just as long to complete suddenly emerge from obscurity, and it becomes clear that a significant team has been working on them for a generation.

Those are the ones we’re going to look at today. We’re going to outline how long some of the projects currently in a shadow of what the Internet has called “development hell” (although that can be misleading) have been in development, and how likely they are to ever be released.

PlayDead’s next game – About nine years in development (we assume)

Danish PlayDead released Inside in 2016, and while it’s almost impossible to speculate, we assume the studio had some idea to some degree of what they wanted to do immediately after. Of course, they continually brought the game to new platforms, including PlayStation in the months that followed, an iOS port in 2017 and a Switch port in 2018, but we still assume that work on the studio’s third game has been underway immediately since its 2016 launch. That gives us a development time, so far, of about nine years. And that’s without the game having a name, PlayDead directly mentioning it, or us having any indication of when the studio will finish.

So today the team (according to their website) consists of 100 employees, and it has taken the studio nine years to get to this point. It’s hard for us to predict or speculate on how this might be financially feasible, and the premise is always that creative souls should take the time they need. But even with all that leeway, it’s still hard to imagine how thePlayDead could have taken nine years, and that’s, again, with no real signs of life other than a few images of the mysterious game.

Beyond Good & Evil 2 – In development in various forms for 18 years

At the time of writing, Beyond Good & Evil 2 holds the record for the game that has spent the longest time in anything resembling active development. How a studio as large as Ubisoft Montpellier delegates its resources is extremely difficult to say, but we still assume that there are several hundred employees actively working on the game, and in the summer of 2023 the game even got a new director in the form of Fawzi Mesmar, after the previous director sadly passed away suddenly.

The previously mentioned record is 15 years, but it was given to the project in 2022, which means it has only increased its lead at this point. This means that the game is approaching an active development period of 18 years, although with the uncertainty that we don’t know exactly how active development has been in different periods.

It is notable, however, how Ubisoft manages to continually unveil projects, only to have them dormant for so long. The game got its “re-unveiling” in 2017 – that’s now eight years ago. And that’s on top of the long and strange period that preceded it, during which Ubisoft directly refused to formally acknowledge the game’s existence, even though they had done exactly that.

Will it ever be released? Yes, it’s really hard to say, but the project is still in active development and Ubisoft has had ample opportunity to pull the plug, but has chosen not to do so continuously.

Judas – first concept developed 10 years ago

Judas actually faded from obscurity some time ago, and although the game recently missed Take-Two’s own launch estimate that claimed it would be released before March 31, 2025 (it didn’t), we know much more about it than the two previous titles.

But to say the least, it still deserves a place on this list because of its wild development period. Ken Levine left Irrational after the launch of BioShock Infinite to form Ghost Story Games in 2017, and although he presented his theoretical idea of “narrative Lego” at several trade shows on different occasions, he and his studio were paid five full years before finally unveiling Judas.

As mentioned, things have been going stronger since then, and the game has been tested by both the Friends-per-Second podcast and others, and at one point it was supposed to be briefly released. So we assume the game is on the horizon, but it’s also Levine’s first game in 12 years.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines II – already about 10 years in development

In 2019, we played Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines II at Gamescom, published a promising preview, and showed an extensive gameplay trailer that certainly gave the impression that, although the game may not be completely finished yet, it was fast approaching completion.

It’s inconceivable that six years later we still don’t have a concrete release date, that the studio behind the advanced version in 2019 no longer exists, and that today’s game, while sharing certain similarities with the project we reviewed, is something entirely different.

Many of the games on this list have been showcased, only for the press and the outside world to gradually realize that the title in question was infinitely far from actual realization, but here it was already a reality in 2019, and yet things went so badly wrong that it remains uncertain whether the new developer, The Chinese Room, will be able to release it this year.

Star Wars Eclipse – we haven’t heard anything in almost four years

We don’t actually know if Star Wars Eclipse exists in the real sense, that’s the truth. Whereas in 2019 we played Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines II, Eclipse was announced in December 2021 and since then we haven’t seen a single sign of life, a single officially released concept art or a shred of information from developer Quantic Dream.

We were promised a more action-oriented game than the studio usually does, but otherwise we have no information about gameplay systems, actual characters or what the structure actually looks like. In other words, this was a cinematic “reveal trailer” apparently made before the studio actually had an actual plan, because if they had, the game would not have been forgotten for nearly four years without any other form of information.

The game was not cancelled immediately, and since Quantic Dream is publicly traded, we know they are still working on it, as they are obligated to communicate any possible cancellation to their investors, but whether it will be similar, whether it will be called “Eclipse” and how long it will take before it is actually released, We just don’t know.

Star Citizen – the first “module” was released 13 years ago

Star Citizen will undoubtedly once again cause a few individuals to comment on the article or go so far as to contact us directly (this has happened several times) to complain about the way we handled the game and the numerous controversies.

They would probably claim that the game has already been released to some extent, as paying customers can play certain modules of it, which are gradually becoming more interconnected. But developer Cloud Imperium has repeatedly stated that there is no 1.0 launch in sight, even though we are on our way to it, and this has been the case for many, many years.

Further, in this case, there is debate as to whether it is actually more lucrative for the studio to maintain the current status quo, with a few “whales” paying staggering amounts of money for digital spaceships and other forms of microtransactions in the game without actually finishing it, thus also funding what is undoubtedly the most expensive game production ever.

We ask the same open-ended question as always, “Do you think Star Citizen will be released in a 1.0 version?”