I think the majority of the improvements come from 3 places.

1. Hardware advancements mean that you can get the same results with less optimized code (this is what allowed 3rd party engines with GC scripting languages to become popular)

2. The proliferation of learning resources and open source code.

3. The budgets and size of indie studios as well as total time spent on the games. Seriously look at some of the games these days that get labeled indie.

Warcraft 1 (my first RTS) had just 4 programmers. And only one of them was on the project the whole time. And the entire project was only 14 months.

> having nobody but Blizzard able to make something that complex ...

> Warcraft 1 had just 4 programmers

This to me sounds like the market for games has changed, such that larger projects are now more viable. Smaller projects with a handful of people may still be viable, but look tiny in comparison.

One of my favourite games of that era, Thief, also had a very small team.

Warcraft 1 was one of my favourite games from my childhood. Probably took me 14 months to beat that one level I always got stuck on.

>Warcraft 1 (my first RTS) had just 4 programmers. And only one of them was on the project the whole time. And the entire project was only 14 months. <

Nice but this isnt even the half of the story: According to ChatGPT, the whole team was "32 people in professional roles", so 8x times of number of programmers. And that ratio even became extremer in the last decades.