<story><title>It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/smarter-living/its-never-going-to-be-perfect-so-just-get-it-done.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paddlepop</author><text>This doesn&amp;#x27;t work so well for video games. Reviews come out saying its thin on content with a score to match and can kill a game before its had a chance to expand.
Developers have started trying to do this more often lately with mixed results, DICE and Blizzard are high profile examples of this.
Blizzards latest World of Warcraft expansion was heavily criticized for the lack of content on release day and has yet to shake the bad blood even after two big content patches.
DICE tried this with Star Wars Battlefront but couldn&amp;#x27;t keep fans long enough with the limited maps it released with.</text></item><item><author>bluGill</author><text>For software you should make something - any part - work and release it.  Then do regular feature releases after that.&lt;p&gt;If you are not working alone you can ask your marketing people for help, sometimes it is worth waiting for a big bang release, sometimes not (For some things if you miss Christmas you should delay until next Christmas). I recommend you err on the side of release too soon - customers are the ultimate answer, if their feedback on what is important is useful to have (but their feedback is not always correct!)</text></item><item><author>CM30</author><text>Well, they&amp;#x27;ve got a point. There are definitely quite a few projects whose creators needed to step back, stop spending years focusing on the wrong things and actually get something done. I mean, look at Duke Nukem Forever. Might have done pretty well had they not spent 14 years on it. Same with many other games and pieces of art that spent decades in development, and sometimes bankrupted&amp;#x2F;broke their creators in the process.&lt;p&gt;Does that mean you should rush? Obviously not. Does that mean having an eye for detail is bad? No, not at all.&lt;p&gt;But it does mean you should try to finish your projects at some point. Something that never gets released at all is pretty much useless, and it&amp;#x27;s probably better to get your products while you&amp;#x27;re alive rather than have them released posthumously by your estate.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also probably worth pointing out that a creator will likely never be as happy with their work as a customer will. After all, you created it, you&amp;#x27;ve got nothing to be surprised by. So right off the bat, some of the &amp;#x27;magic&amp;#x27; found in experiencing a piece of fiction&amp;#x2F;work of art for the first time is immediately gone.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re also quite likely to see all the flaws, all the things you could have done better, all the possibilities that didn&amp;#x27;t pan out yet, etc and feel disappointed compared to some ideal you had in your mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>It doesn&amp;#x27;t work for AAA games, but it can work really well for indie games.  Think of something like Factorio, where version 0.1 looked like this:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.factorio.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;post&amp;#x2F;fff-184&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.factorio.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;post&amp;#x2F;fff-184&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then they just kept releasing every week for 7 years, and now you have people building CPUs and explaining Apache Kafka with it.&lt;p&gt;Ostriv is another recent game that comes to mind as having a similar development cycle.  Also many F2P MMOs - most of the non-Blizzard online games I know do regular releases that frequently change the game mechanics (often, to a big player uproar) but still keep their userbase.  Fortnight and Pokemon Go are two big ones here.</text></comment>
<story><title>It’s Never Going to Be Perfect, So Just Get It Done</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/smarter-living/its-never-going-to-be-perfect-so-just-get-it-done.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paddlepop</author><text>This doesn&amp;#x27;t work so well for video games. Reviews come out saying its thin on content with a score to match and can kill a game before its had a chance to expand.
Developers have started trying to do this more often lately with mixed results, DICE and Blizzard are high profile examples of this.
Blizzards latest World of Warcraft expansion was heavily criticized for the lack of content on release day and has yet to shake the bad blood even after two big content patches.
DICE tried this with Star Wars Battlefront but couldn&amp;#x27;t keep fans long enough with the limited maps it released with.</text></item><item><author>bluGill</author><text>For software you should make something - any part - work and release it.  Then do regular feature releases after that.&lt;p&gt;If you are not working alone you can ask your marketing people for help, sometimes it is worth waiting for a big bang release, sometimes not (For some things if you miss Christmas you should delay until next Christmas). I recommend you err on the side of release too soon - customers are the ultimate answer, if their feedback on what is important is useful to have (but their feedback is not always correct!)</text></item><item><author>CM30</author><text>Well, they&amp;#x27;ve got a point. There are definitely quite a few projects whose creators needed to step back, stop spending years focusing on the wrong things and actually get something done. I mean, look at Duke Nukem Forever. Might have done pretty well had they not spent 14 years on it. Same with many other games and pieces of art that spent decades in development, and sometimes bankrupted&amp;#x2F;broke their creators in the process.&lt;p&gt;Does that mean you should rush? Obviously not. Does that mean having an eye for detail is bad? No, not at all.&lt;p&gt;But it does mean you should try to finish your projects at some point. Something that never gets released at all is pretty much useless, and it&amp;#x27;s probably better to get your products while you&amp;#x27;re alive rather than have them released posthumously by your estate.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also probably worth pointing out that a creator will likely never be as happy with their work as a customer will. After all, you created it, you&amp;#x27;ve got nothing to be surprised by. So right off the bat, some of the &amp;#x27;magic&amp;#x27; found in experiencing a piece of fiction&amp;#x2F;work of art for the first time is immediately gone.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re also quite likely to see all the flaws, all the things you could have done better, all the possibilities that didn&amp;#x27;t pan out yet, etc and feel disappointed compared to some ideal you had in your mind.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>michaelbrave</author><text>You are right, but the situations with wow and battlefront are a bit more complex than that. Wow was more due to unfun mechanics and poor reward systems than lack of content (though that was a factor). Also battlefront had a size-able protest due to pricing disagreements. Both of which are dependent on community so as it diminishes it rolls downhill fast.</text></comment>