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It's "release early, release often" but I guess it doesn't matter much. Speaking as a former founder of a video games company, I think that this kind of thinki

It's "release early, release often" but I guess it doesn't matter much. Speaking as a former founder of a video games company, I think that this kind of thinking is inherent to the entire industry and it is killing it. The inspiration clearly comes from the movie industry where admittedly, you don't make a movie in small iterations. As it stands now, triple-A titles have to make it to the top ten to be profitable due to extreme development costs which drives up marketing prices which in turn drives up the price of the games to the consumer. This spiral is really bad for the industry. I think that indie and small developers will take over most of the market because they do much smaller and more frequent releases.

jim-greer 17y ago
How exactly are you supposed to "release early, release often" when you're shipping DVDs to tens of thousands of retail locations? After going through months and months of Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo certification on a 3-ring binder full of technical requirements? And having the ESRB play every level of your game to make sure it doesn't have boobs or entrails? Not to mention that for every programmer on these games there are 5 to 10 artists and level designers cranking out content. There's no automated regression suite to make sure that your last minute physics tweak didn't break one puzzle in one level somewhere. There's a reason that console developers have miserable lives - they have huge teams and launch dates that are very expensive to move. I'm not saying that things couldn't be done better, but it's a fundamentally hard problem.
- teamonkey 17y ago
  Hence the qualifier about indie and small devs, I imagine.
allenp 17y ago
No he really is talking about failure not releasing. He is specifically talking about the core design and iterating over the design to optimize it before releasing. His take is that on mega-budget projects there isn't a luxury to do this and so it is better to just pick and freeze the design at the start and stay the course regardless of what happens. I totally agree with you that this thinking is self-destructive. What isn't mentioned here are development teams that aren't doing this but will (probably) be fairly successful, like the new Starcraft 2 game. Alternative methods like agile dev or stage gate would take longer and cost more but are more likely to produce more fun. I think this blog post is a good explanation: http://lostgarden.com/2007/02/rockets-cars-and-gardens-visualizing.html http://lostgarden.com/2007/02/rockets-cars-and-gardens-visua...

jim-greer 17y ago

How exactly are you supposed to "release early, release often" when you're shipping DVDs to tens of thousands of retail locations? After going through months and months of Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo certification on a 3-ring binder full of technical requirements? And having the ESRB play every level of your game to make sure it doesn't have boobs or entrails? Not to mention that for every programmer on these games there are 5 to 10 artists and level designers cranking out content. There's no automated regression suite to make sure that your last minute physics tweak didn't break one puzzle in one level somewhere. There's a reason that console developers have miserable lives - they have huge teams and launch dates that are very expensive to move. I'm not saying that things couldn't be done better, but it's a fundamentally hard problem.

teamonkey 17y ago
Hence the qualifier about indie and small devs, I imagine.

allenp 17y ago

No he really is talking about failure not releasing. He is specifically talking about the core design and iterating over the design to optimize it before releasing. His take is that on mega-budget projects there isn't a luxury to do this and so it is better to just pick and freeze the design at the start and stay the course regardless of what happens. I totally agree with you that this thinking is self-destructive. What isn't mentioned here are development teams that aren't doing this but will (probably) be fairly successful, like the new Starcraft 2 game. Alternative methods like agile dev or stage gate would take longer and cost more but are more likely to produce more fun. I think this blog post is a good explanation: http://lostgarden.com/2007/02/rockets-cars-and-gardens-visualizing.html http://lostgarden.com/2007/02/rockets-cars-and-gardens-visua...