It's been a solid 10 years for the folks over at Astronauts studio working on witchfire. The reason for it? The management didn't want to go and sell their shares to the outside investors.
The Astronauts studio rejected outside funding to maintain creative control, extending development by a decade
It made them independent. They had full creative control. But it also made this game take much longer than most commercial titles to develop. Now the community eagerly waiting for the 1.0 release knows exactly how much the value of quick market entry is as opposed to being independent for your studio.
There are 26 core devs working at the studio right now. These are the ones who are doing the main design and programming for the game. The studio is also outsourcing the art and audio tasks to other people to help manage the huge scope of the game.
On top of it all, they're using the Unreal engine 4 (to make sure the game is stable. Not to use the new unreal engine 5).
It's been in early access on epic games store and Steam for over 3 years before it's ready to get the final release. For the 1.0 they won't be requiring the player to delete their save files. But, they would recommend starting over to see some major changes in the story and environment.
Right now, they're only working on the PC. There will be console versions in the future but they're not actively developing them at the moment.
Director Adrian Chmielarz makes sure that they don't use generative ai for making game assets (but they can use non-generative ai for other things). So yeah, they had a lot of people wanting to invest in them. But they wanted to be fiscally responsible and independent.
That way, they didn't have to sell a single bit of their studio. The price for that? A 10 year development time.
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