In a September 29, 2023 interview with the game's director Kyle Rowley and principal narrative designer Molly Maloney published in MP1st, they were asked what took the sequel so long to make? Rowley stated that when the team completed Alan Wake, they really wanted to make a sequel, but because of various different reasons, nothing panned out. Every time they'd tried to make a new game, it started out as Alan Wake 2, so Quantum Break had foundations that came from some ideas they wanted to make for Alan Wake 2, Control got some ideas that the team originally were exploring to do a sequel for Alan Wake 2, and they just didn't necessarily fit the kind of game they wanted to make at the time, so they "just kind of drifted in or whatever". Some time during or after Control's development, they decided they really wanted to look for a way to make the Alan Wake sequel. According to them, the video game industry at the time was getting increasingly fixated on horror, not only the in the games, but also in pop culture. Rowley thought the success of Control allowed the team more freedom to somewhat explore those kinds of opportunities.

Maloney stated that she thought that idea also had a lot of them really excited. She commented that the game's creative director Sam Lake sometimes says "it's not the first version of Alan Wake 2, but it is the best version". She thought it was a combination of the right idea and Epic Games being a great partner to the developers, describing it like the planets aligned and the game finally got to be made when it needed to be made.