I was wondering if we have someone here who is at least familiar with game development and what's involved.  It seems even big movies can be churned out in a fraction of the time.  
What's the holdup?  Is programming and testing that intense that it takes years?
I know almost nothing about it other than a couple I'm waiting on are around a DECADE since last release with no date even available on the next. Why?

GTA V September 17, 2013

Skyrim November 11, 2011


Maybe I'll be able to check out Fallout 5 before I die.  Big-ass maybe.

Profit.

If they can spend less on labor and building out new games, because the sales of the games they already made continue to sell for years... then there is no market force making them invest more, to get more product to market "faster".

Star Citizen is going to be great.  Maybe my great grandchildren will get to play it.

Star citizen is a good example


But more seriously, both titles you listed came from game developers who decided to work on other stuff. I'm glad we don't get biannual COD/BF type rollouts from these guys

To use Skyrim for example, afterwards they went Fallout 4 (2015), Fallout 76 (2018) and the new one soon...Starfield I think? That's not counting anything else they might have done or kicked around during that timeframe that I'm not aware of but 3 big titles off the tip of my head since Skyrim.

Part of it is just resourcing and focusing on a project but another part is that game development is hard, relatively speaking.  A big budget movie is gonna be a roughly 2 hour experience.  Most modern AAA games are 40+ hours of gameplay.  Some 100+ (Red Dead Redemption).  Sure they shoot multiple takes and do rewrites and all that, but in the end it's still a 2 hour movie.  Some games (RDR2) have thousands of lines of voice acted dialog alone.  Way more than your average movie.

Voice actors have to be hired, orchestras and other musicians for music, actors for mocap, plus teams of hundreds of developers.  

Sequels that companies like Ubisoft dishout annually are much easier.  But doing something ala God of War or RDR2 is a whole lotta work.  Games like that can spend years just in preproduction, then 3-5 years of development.  Some much longer, some shorter.  

Then there's countless hours of testing not only for regular code bugs, but compatibility bugs, driver's, etc.  And if there's an issue you can wind up needing to make big changes to your code if it's spaghetti code (ala Total Warhammer 3).  

I don't want them to go faster, honestly.  Rushing a game usually means you get a shitty/bud-ridden launch.  And I really wish companies like Activision and Ubisoft would stop regurgitating the same garbage annually

Multiply the length of the movie by at least 10, then instead of just filming something pretend you have to build all of it from the ground up, then animate everything that moves, then paint it all as realistically as possible, then record all the voices for all the characters, then program every conversation, reaction and action for everyone. Then play the whole thing a few thousand times to make sure everything works right.

Getting an idea for a game then downloading RPGMaker to make it will be eye opening