The problem with AAA games is the development time is longer, the time spent working on the final game is not.

Time and time again when a game as been “in development” for 5/7/10+ years, the game that shipped was only really being worked on for the last year or two, once they finally got the design and gameplay nailed down and worked on the final game. Anthem is one of the more egregious examples in that some of the developers working on the game learned at the E3 presentation a year before launch that the game involved flying.

There’s an iceberg of effort and only a fraction of it gets released.