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Dusk said:
Scoobes said:

There are actually more third party developers then ever before. You could argue there are less third party AAA developers, but I'm not sure how true that is either as the more sucessful studios tend to expand and have multiple teams working on multiple titles but under the same studio name.

I'd argue there are less AAA games in the same time frame because they take so damn long to make these days. Even Call of Duty has moved to a three year dev cycle.

How do you figure? The large studios aren't expanding and working on more games, they are actually aquiring more studios and teams to work on less games. 10 studios are working on AC Unity, 10! It makes no difference whether COD is a three year development cycle cause they have so many damn studios working on them one is released every year. Why not just have a group working on COD that releases every three years and then the rest of the stuidos could work on something different, maybe multiple different smaller less costly titles. In 2013 Ubisoft released 12 games, 2012-24, 2011-28, 2010-23, 2009-31, 2008-32. Oh and 2014 is looking to have 10. 

Less games. 

That's not refuting what I was saying. You've basically said large publishers have huge studios working on multiple games (in the same franchise a lot of the time) that take ages to come out because development takes ages. That's pretty much what I said in the case of AAA third parties. You also have sucess stories from last gen like Bioware, Insomniac and CDProjekt that have multiple teams and franchises on the go whereas before they only had one or two; more games, longer time-frames.

But, there are still more third party developers because there are many more smaller indie developers that publish directly to consumers via PSN.