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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?"
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. Fancy graphics and physics? Doom 3 did that, so Half-Life 2 only has storyline and gameplay (arguably the two hardest things to implement in a game).
No in the case of EA Games's style of releasing buggy games. We KNOW they're pretty much the Microsoft of developing games, we KNOW they have a stranglehold on developers, we KNOW not to play a version 1.0 of any EA game now. In the case of EA Games, they need to stop putting these games out so quickly and just polish them up. We don't need a BF1942/Vietnam clone/sequel/expansion only to have it even more buggy than the previous one.
Regarding Sony, specifically, they have lost their reputation as a MMO developer over the SWG fiasco. Jump to Lightspeed is apparently causing all sorts of bugs in the looting tables for the ground game, and people's items have been randomly disappearing since they started patching the code, I hear. The word on the street is that EQ2 is not ready yet either, although not as catastrophically bad as SWG at release. Given that Sony never got the 1 million customer base they predicted for SWG, they are hurting and in need of both market share and operating cash to keep their boats afloat. Tons of players are not going to play EQ2 (which will be a decent game, for its genre), due to their experiences with their other buggy releases. This is going to be a tough holiday season for game developers. A lot of the products they are putting out are extremely well made and very time consuming, I suspect a lot of players may only be able to tackle 2-3 of them until the end of the year. A lot of people will take a "wait and see" attitude on early MMO releases, given that they have a boatload of solid single player console and PC games to keep them busy until the mess sorts itself out. Blizzard can sit on WoW as long as they want. It has massive hype, and is in better shape than any MMO I have ever played, and it is still in Beta. They have a built in base of single player and online gamers waiting for their product, and a mountain of disgruntled MMO players who can bide their time in their less than satifactory worlds, until WoW comes out. Blizzard also drips with credibility regarding their quality control process, an increasingly important asset for anyone in the MMO market.
The author of that quote is Shigeru Miyamoto
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."