Most gamers tend to strongly (stridently) argue for the latter option, that it is always better to wait and polish and perfect (even though they may also eagerly anticipate the release of a particular game)Aesthetically, I would agree, and I suspect so would most developersBut in business terms, it's not so clearEssentially, it boils down to this: do you lose a substantial enough potential base of customers by launching prematurely to justify the enormous continuing expense of development costs before revenue comes in through box sales and continuing subscriptions? 

If you were guaranteed 100k customers at launch regardless of the condition of the game, and would lose only another 25k "borderline" subscribers due to bad conditions at launch, is it worth another 2 months of development costs to rope in most or all of the borderline subscribers? Especially if there's a similar product coming out from a competitor that might steal those subscribers away from you in the interim? Especially if you're not certain that two more months--or two more years--can actually "fix" a MMOG sufficiently that it is reasonably bug-free, stable, and rich in feature sets and content? It also raises some interesting non-design problemsIt looks to me as if it would discourage RMT, for example, because investments won't necessarily be seen as sufficiently long-termThe truth is World of Warcraft Gold doesn't HAVE to take a long time to get, especially in the higher levelsBuy WOW Gold here, and then enjoy your excited WoW life! Warhammer Online Goldwill keep your high powerOn the other hand, if RMTers persuade the courts that people own what their characters own, the whole concept of a purge might be threatened

Other kinds of (creative) human activity vanish from its radar screen

This is an argument that forms part of a chapter I've written for a volume I'm co-editing  with Sandra Braman (Command Lines) that is currently under review, and there the specific example is Second Life and the challenges that the varieties of user content therein make to the multiple ideas about content held by the different teams within Linden LabBut GDC led me to see this claim as more applicable here as wellThey looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at usIt was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations

After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even strangerSomeone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted pointsIan made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic researchWhile I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developersAnd there are huge gaps in what we don't knowWhere is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from itI hope the audience did as well

But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown)And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companiesMaybe the issue is the "larger" communityIt's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that levelBut I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going onI don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to beBut then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yet

The best way to put the assertion (and this is all it is at this point; and again, please keep in mind that there are a number of familiar exceptions) is that the practice of game software development generates a way of seeing and defining problems (as essentially precise, logical, and algorithmic), and creating solutions (through linear, text-defined code) that makes other ways of accounting for what happens in VWs seem at worst nonsensical and at best irrelevant or quixotic.

The problem for me in judging this is that most of the test cases you could use to establish a reasonable rule of thumb are profoundly debatable.

For example, would Star Wars: Galaxies have double or triple the number of subscribers it has today if it had waited another three months to launch?