I don't know, maybe because they are making a new one and put them out every few years?
There was about a 7 year gap between Joker3Pro and DQM3 (The Dark Prince). But in that gap there were some mobile remakes of DQM1 and 2, which meant DQM3 was about ~4 years since the last DQM release.
It's been 3 years since DQM3 came out. It's the right time. It's just that Square Enix between DQMJ2 and DQM3 were being supreme faggots and refusing to release a lot of Dragon Quest games in the West (and the ones they did, they liked to fuck up).
40 year jubilee and all you get is a 10 minute boomer commercial with some scrapheap game and bullshit spinoff announcement with no real info lol
Did you not watch the two hour long infomercial before the reveal where they showed off merch such as DQ Shampoo, DQ makeup sponges, DQ bath bombs, DQ bathtowels, DQ Glasses, DQ Sneakers, a $1500 music box...
I think they're funding Horii's retirement with all that.
What IS amusing is they didn't do that announcement live, they left, waited about 30 minutes, then showed the 10 minute video announcing "oh we fucked DQ12 up REAL BAD so we started over from scratch but hey here's some DQM to tide you over while we fix this." Normally you'd show that off during the infomercial and then take pre-staged questions from the other hosts, but, nope.
They knew it was gonna be real, real bad. There were almost half a million people watching what was supposed to be the DQ12 reveal live on Youtube and that chat crashed youtube's chat system when he announced they restarted it. Also crashed again when they showed off the DQ5 Waifus.
They're saying on X and Reddit that apparently Horii said when DQ11 came out that he had been penciling out a game where the plot was "what if dreams came true/affected reality" so that's probably going to be the theme of the game. DQ6 already did that, tho?
And apparently people already noticed that the trailer took place in the starting area of DQ9, only done up in high def.