That's my bet as well. You xant crank out fees lije BG3. It's an art form for starters and development time is huge.
A big developer coukd probably do it in 2-3 years via multiple studios.
First is true, second is completely untrue.
There's no developer in the world who could create an AAA RPG with even half the scope of Baldur's Gate 3 in "2-3 years". If you think there is one, name them, and let's have a look at how long it takes them to develop games from scratch. Historically, involving multiple studios doesn't make things faster, it just costs vastly more and makes a bigger mess.
Let's look at some RPGs of the last few years, and how long it took to develop them:
- Starfield - In planning/pre-production for about 4 years, in active development for 7 years.
- Cyberpunk 2077 - In planning/pre-production for 4 years, in active development for 4 years.*
- Baldur's Gate 3 - In active development for 6 years.
- Elden Ring - In active development for 5 years.
If you made a sequel in the same engine, using some of the same assets, and using the same team to make it, with broadly similar mechanics, you could probably hit 3 to 4 years. You could not hit 2-3. To put out a CRPG in 2-3 years you have to scale down to AA levels, like Owlcat or Obsidian (though Avowed may be a lower-end AAA, we shall see if that MS money has been used), and even then it's not guaranteed. And no Owlcat-style CRPG is going to do the insane numbers BG3 is doing or even a large fraction of them, as much as it may charm niche gamers. BG3 has made WotC $90m - that's nuts - even if WotC had a 5% cut of gross revenue (which would be huge), that would mean BG3 had made $1.8bn. That's not something you can replicate easily.
* = But it definitely released too early - it needed at least another year of solid development and that impacted sales, especially longer-term sales. They had to spend another three years on basically fixing the game and getting it to where it should have been,