What I find particularly interesting about games is that it is treated as an entertainment product from a marketing prospective (which obviously it is) but it i

What I find particularly interesting about games is that it is treated as an entertainment product from a marketing prospective (which obviously it is) but it is the only software that is treated this way. We get release dates sometimes a year or 2 in advance and yet maybe internally we (software engineers not in the games industry) have some idea of a release date but we sure don't share that publicly beyond maybe a month. You could argue that there are pieces of this in movies, particularly in CGI and animated movies like Pixar. But from what I have seen a lot of that tends to be more finalized once we have a release date in that area. Maybe even at the rendering state. I wish more games could follow a better software development pattern but it would be really hard to change the industry now it seems like. Gamers expect it and publishers expect it.