Quarto
Unknown Enemy
Well, I'm pretty sure I'm not disagreeing with the idea that it's always best to release a completely finished product 
. Nonetheless, sometimes it's just not sensible. And it doesn't always guarantee better quality, particularly in cases where the project's original requirements weren't sensible. We don't live in an ideal world, and you've met your share of incompetent managers. You know how planning looks in our industry. In one case, a project I worked on got effectively turned inside-out, because lousy planning and constantly shifting deadlines finally caused the distributors to abandon the project. Consequently, it was only possible to release the project digitally, which most certainly devastated sales. The game still ended up being very rough around the edges, but the difference was, now it was guaranteed to be financially terrible, so the team could be fired, and there was nobody to even produce any kind of patch for the game. Had the game been published earlier, even at the cost of some features, perhaps at least it could have generated more sales and justified any kind of post-release support. The biggest irony: I told them, cut the multiplayer, we can't do it on our budget and timeline. They said no, multiplayer is vital. Eventually, after wasting precious time and resources on multiplayer.... they still ended up having to cut it.
Another example is Standoff, which would never have been released if we had not built it in episodic format, adding features as we went, and patching earlier episodes with newer ones. That's not to say we would have stopped working on it for sure... maybe we'd still be pushing it along now, finding an hour every now and then to work on the project. But given that none of us have time now, the project would, at best, be effectively dead, and at worst, officially and actually dead. And in the case of something like Star Citizen, certainly, if keeping the fundraising campaign energised ever becomes an issue, the obvious thing to do will be to release something to encourage people to give more money. If that ever happens, it certainly won't be an elegant solution - but if it works...
. Nonetheless, sometimes it's just not sensible. And it doesn't always guarantee better quality, particularly in cases where the project's original requirements weren't sensible. We don't live in an ideal world, and you've met your share of incompetent managers. You know how planning looks in our industry. In one case, a project I worked on got effectively turned inside-out, because lousy planning and constantly shifting deadlines finally caused the distributors to abandon the project. Consequently, it was only possible to release the project digitally, which most certainly devastated sales. The game still ended up being very rough around the edges, but the difference was, now it was guaranteed to be financially terrible, so the team could be fired, and there was nobody to even produce any kind of patch for the game. Had the game been published earlier, even at the cost of some features, perhaps at least it could have generated more sales and justified any kind of post-release support. The biggest irony: I told them, cut the multiplayer, we can't do it on our budget and timeline. They said no, multiplayer is vital. Eventually, after wasting precious time and resources on multiplayer.... they still ended up having to cut it.Another example is Standoff, which would never have been released if we had not built it in episodic format, adding features as we went, and patching earlier episodes with newer ones. That's not to say we would have stopped working on it for sure... maybe we'd still be pushing it along now, finding an hour every now and then to work on the project. But given that none of us have time now, the project would, at best, be effectively dead, and at worst, officially and actually dead. And in the case of something like Star Citizen, certainly, if keeping the fundraising campaign energised ever becomes an issue, the obvious thing to do will be to release something to encourage people to give more money. If that ever happens, it certainly won't be an elegant solution - but if it works...
