Originally posted by Turbo Torben:

Well, to be fair, coding may not happen faster, but with hundreds of millions in profits one would think they could extensively expand their team and invest in new office space and hardware to get things developed faster. For example, by simultaneously developing several things at once

I'm all for being patient and give developers time to properly develop and test their ideas, however, 1 year for 1 patch that 'only' offers additional build pieces is perhaps stretching it

You can't just immediately 'invest in new office space', fill it out with new developers, and expect them to start pumping out code immediately for something like a game that's already out the door.

In fact, bringing new developers into an existing project can actually slow development down, since those new developers will need to be trained by the existing developers and have their work QA'd by them.

You can't just hire someone to do QA immediately either, since that person will *also* need training before they can be effective at their job. Software development isn't something you can just thoughtlessly throw bodies and money at unless you want a bad product.

This is an indie project that went viral. They hit the business equivalent of winning the lottery. For any small studio that became an overnight sensation, dealing with the sudden success and readjusting the studio in order to meet the new challenges they face would absolutely a year-long process in any event.