Apparently the development budget was 306 million Zloty, which is approximately 100 million USD. I agree with your points. was the development only three  years though? That would be very efficient for what they accomplished. I mean it was delayed for 7 months are so, but if that still puts it in the ~3 year window that's something to be admired

I'm sure that amount include's marketing, but I don't have a source I can remember. But from what I've heard, it was only 3 years. 

And do you think Ubi Montreal is a single team? Nope. They probably have like 10 teams and they alternate in the releases. Even with huge team a 1 year timeschedule for those type of games is crazy, it isn't sport game with only rooster changes.

4 years and 230 people. They sure churned that out.

Of course it will.

One of the consecuences of giving them more time would be that they can use less studios to make the game. We could say, so to speak, that what two studios make in one year, one studio can make it in two years. And that solves (or at least reduces) several problems like the comunication or the decision making problems.

1,500 people worked on The Witcher 3: http://www.vg247.com/2016/01/13/over-1500-people-worked-on-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt/

Rockstar Games as a whole has 900 employees (according to wikipedia).

That's not to say that CDProjekt Red hasn't done a great job, but it's not necessary to exagerate.

I doubt they alternate between releases. The Assassin's Creed team (or teams in Montreal) work in AC games and the Far Cry team work on FC games. Mixing them would cause extra problems that Ubisoft can't afford in an annual franchise.

As for your second part, that's exactly why they use several studios and what causes some of their problems and ultimately make the games end up being like they do: uninspired and "more of the same".

There may be an AC team or department, but they don't necessairily work all on the same game together. They could have subdivision. But that doesn't matter, their biggest problem is communication not tight timeline.

But the tight timeline is what causes some of those communications problems. The yearly releases force that several studios have to work together to get the game done in time, and that causes the communication problems.

If the game was bi-annual, the number of studios involved in the development could be lowered, maybe to only Montreal and Quebec, and that would simplify the communications while also speed up other tasks like making the right choices and the set up of priorities.

agree on the tight deadline. it is more of a time issue regardless if there are onshore/offshore work. it is hard to beat the timeline and most of the developers are working extra time to finish their work and hand it off to the next shift person. it would be better to stretch it out a bit - 2-3 years apart. if the game is really great and less glitchy/buggy. i'm sure the gamers would buy the next game. even now, AC series are still selling well anyway. :D

Kojima has a great vision but i think he overbudgeted which Konami management was pissed off, i think. that is the problem when you gave control on the budget to certain people who just extended the budget without limits. Besides SE, which Japanese studio really went into western type of AAA game budget?

Perhaps, but without doing root cause investigation we can't assume anything... and in Lean we wouldn't look on how to stretch a process to make it take 3x more, but how to make it happen without problems in the time already available or how to reduce time... so we could either separate the teams in 3 to give each 3 years in alternation or see how to improve comunication... Only increasing time would make the budget 3x higher with no economical gain, who would apply it?

That would only be true if the same teams that now make an AC game in 1 year were involved in making it in 3 years, which wouldn't happen. Even more, those teams that now are busy working on AC games could actually work on other franchises or even start new IPs that would help Ubisoft as they could have 3-4 strong IPs that could be launched one each year, giving them a steady income while also ensuring a certain quality in their products.

And yes, in an ideal world Ubisoft would find a way to solve all their problems and keep launching one AC game each year while maintainung the quality, but we don't live in such world. So their option is to either put more people or teams into the yearly development of the game and prey that the problems won't get bigger/worse, or pause the whole thing to evaluate which are the problems and where do they come from, then solve it and start to make game again. There is of course a third option, which is to give the project extra time in order to identify and solve the problems as they appear, trying to get rid of all the problems and, once done, increase the production rate again.

Now honestly, I think that the best thing that Ubi could do is give AC a rest. They have burned too many historical settings in a very short time that could have been used more extensively.