What is The Cost of an Early Release?

Everguide writes "Sony Online Entertainment recently announced that they would be releasing EverQuest 2 on November 8th, ahead of their main competition World of Warcraft (last predicted release date: Week of November 22). SOE is notorious for launching games with content that is not finished or buggy, and Blizzard is known for at times delaying a game just to work out minor bugs. Is it worth launching a game early, yet buggy, to grab market share from the competition? I know the Themis group thinks a poor launch can cost a company millions of dollars but will the benefit of launching early exceed the costs?"

Comments

I can't remember the author...

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

but I found a quote several years back that went something like this...

A late game is only late until the moment it launches
A bad game is bad forever.

Games like Anarchy Online that ended up being decent games, suffered drastically at launch and word got around that the game had issues, wasn't worth trying, etc. and they no doubt lost a lot of potential customers over this.

Get the game right and then launch. You're always going to have isssues with someone who is using a 4 MB video card or only 64 MB of RAM on their mobo, or some other issue - that's going to happen - don't let the people who bothered to read the minimum requirements and have met them suffer because you wanted to get the game out first.

I worked for a very wise man once

[MerlynEmrys67]

He said.
A year from now no one will remember that it was a year late.

A year from now they will remember that it was completely useless - and never buy from you again.

This was business software so it had a slightly longer lifetime - but the principle still applies - if you have a reputation for bad software - it will follow you forever.

i'm in the beta

[Naikrovek]

along with the other tens of thousands of folks that are in beta.

it seems that the consensus among the beta testers is that the game is ready. there are no major known bugs that i've ever come across, and there are very few glitches to speak of. there are a few lag issues in key zones, but they've taken care of that in a way that i'm happy with.

the bad rep that SOE got was from SWG, and it was deserved in that case. that game still isn't ready for production, mainly because they're still altering the game design on a monthly basis. if they would just stop changing things they'd be doing okay.

Everquest 2 is a very good game, imho. I never played Everquest but I know that I like and enjoy EQ2 a lot.

in my opinion it is ready now. in 10 days when it is released, it will even be more ready. they're literally working 24/7 to get everything fixed before the release that they can, and i'm certain that you can expect a not-insignificant patch the first time you launch the client.

this is my honest opinion. I play it every day and I enjoy it every day. There are no showstopping bugs that I've come across and very few that I know about. Those are higher-level things and they'll have those fixed by the time anyone gets up to that level i'm sure.

so yeah i'm cool with the game as it is now.

and fyi, the game is huuuge. the lands are huge. the vocally active (read: speaking, as in you hear them) NPCs really add a lot more than I thought they would. the scenery is grand. on my pc (which is kinda wimpy -athlon 3000 @ 2.1ghz, 1.5gb ram, ati radeon 9800 pro 128mb) it runs at about 30fps, at 1600x1200, running at the setting just above "balanced." I forget what that setting is called now, but that's where I'm running. I have also turned on a few things like specular highlighting that aren't turned on in that performance profile.

the heroic opportunities are fun, and there are somewhat subtle visual clues, telling you what you need to do to continue the chain. the end of the chain is usually a "devastating blow" to your opponent, or sometimes it is a buff or a heal to yourself. so its not just a "double-click the enemy and wait until one of you dies" which is how I find a lot of mmorpg games. Meaning that if you want to fight anything above your own level you have to think about what you're doing before you even begin to engage the enemy. that's a kind of challenge that i enjoy in a game like this.

Everquest 2 is fun. I'll be buying it on release day and I'll be playing it that night. And I'll have a lot of fun doing it.

YOUR mileage may vary.

Re:Rarely yes, often no

[Dirtside]

Yes in the case of the Doom 3 vs Half-Life 2 argument. Doom 3 lacked polish when it went beyond single-player which hurt it badly (deathmatch only? fun, but lacks variety). But in anyway you look at it, Doom 3 put a dent in Half-Life 2's fanfare.

This is somewhat tangential, but don't make the mistake of assuming that Doom 3 was "hurt" at all by lacking polish beyond single player. id Software isn't in the business of selling games: they're in the business of selling game engines. They make far more money doing that than they do from selling copies of a game like Doom 3. Don't get me wrong, game sales are a nice side benefit, but essentially Doom 3 (and every id game since Quake) has been released in order to demonstrate the new engine they've created. id then licenses the engine to numerous developers, who wrap their own content around it.