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I dunno, Dwarf Fortress and UnReal World (no relation to the FPS series) suggest that forever projects can produce quality. The problem with Concord has less to do with Duke Nukem Forever Syndrome and more to do with "not reading the room" (i.e. the market: any corporation who shoved out a hero shooter with bland characters in an oversaturated market would have gotten egg on their face regardless of dev time, budget, or name branding).
And nowadays, you can slave away at a project for a good long time and get valuable feedback along the way: it's called Early Access. Even games that aren't on Steam can take advantage of this paradigm (again, see also: Itch. A good example would be the indie horror sandbox Voices of the Void, which has been worked on by a single dev and a couple of artists for a number of years, supported mainly by Patreon subscriptions).
I have such mixed feelings about early access. Or similar mechanisms of protracted public development.
On the one hand, yes, it provides that feedback I think a game developed for 10 years in private wouldn't get. On the other hand, it's just GaaS by another name, where so long as the game continues to sell the developer will keep incrementally adding onto his cash cow. I always think of that phrase "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Public development encourages the complete opposite of this, with more and more being piled onto an increasingly shaky gameplay frame until the whole thing teeters over under the weight of almost a decade of slapped on sub mechanics attempting to keep the game relevant on Steam's front page.
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