Better late than never... right?

The almighty developers at Blizzard have inspired this post. As some of you may or may not have heard, they recently came out and said there is no way that Diablo 3 will come out in 2010. This is no surprise to me; I have been expecting a 2011 release date for a while now. I am a bit worried by them actually coming out and saying something though. If they have said it'll be at least 2011 before it comes out, my money is on 2012 or maybe even later given their track record of delaying releases; what game of theirs hasn't been delayed? (Looking at you Starcraft 2 installments)

Blizzard is one of my favorite developers; they always put out a top of the line product. Nintendo, another one of my favorite developers, has also always taken the same approach in terms of delaying to ensure that the game that comes out is a good one. Shigeru Miyamoto said something to the effect of "A bad game that is released on time is always bad; a delayed game will eventually be good." Right on, I agree with that sentiment. But let's look at Diablo 3 for a second. Diablo 2 came out in 1999; Diablo 3 will come out in 2011 at the earliest. That's 12 years apart. The game will end up having 7 or more years of development time. (I believe they said that they started around 2004, maybe earlier)

So here's my problem: if it's going to take 7 years for a top-notch developer to create a good game, aren't quality games going to become fewer and farther between in the future? I sincerely hope that Diablo 3 turns out to be one of the greatest games of all time, but if it doesn't I'm going to bemoan the amount of time that I've waited for it. This complaint stands in stark contrast to the shovelware problem on the Nintendo Wii, so I'm not really angry about the development time, it just makes me wonder. However the game turns out it will still sell millions of copies and make Blizzard millions of dollars and should at the least be a good game. But since Blizzard decided to let us know it was in development 3+ years prior to its release, it's going to be a painful wait...