Comment by AstroBen

And Stardew Valley... which took 4-5 years. Vampire Survivors. I'm aware of these. They all have one thing in common: limited in scope or massively simplified in some area

Dwarf Fortress still has basically no animations after close to 20 years in development, and spent most of its life in ascii for good reason. The final art pack I'm fairly sure was contracted out

That's my point. Larger scoped projects are gated by capital or bigger founding teams. Maybe they don't have to be. Maybe in the future 3 friends could build a viable Overwatch competitor