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Starcraft Ghost Update
GamesIndustry.biz has an interview up with Blizzard creative director Chris Metzen and VP of business operations Paul Sams, where they discuss the status of the Starcraft Ghost title. From the article: "Basically the status of that is that we've kind of gone back and reassessed certain of the elements of the game that we felt needed to be refined. I think E3 was a big influence to us - we looked at other products that were in that genre, and felt as if we were quite competitive in many ways, but maybe there were some other things that we weren't getting to where we needed to go."
I don't think it is true with movies either.
The predicatable part of the schedule for movie production happens after the script has been written and directors and actors signed. Predicting how long it will take for all of the steps after that is a relatively straightforward business.
However, before you get to that stage there are a number of steps which are not predictable. Someone writes the script. Perhaps it goes through re-writes. You need to retain the right director. Casting for principal characters needs to be done. All of those steps are highly variable, and are not easy to predict accurately.
Think of all of those movies you've heard about being "in development" for years. Remember back when the rumour was that James Cameron was going to direct Spiderman? How long has the Hitch-Hiker's movie been talked about? How many attempts at scripts for various movies are abandoned before the final version is settled on?
If you count all of that time, I would argue that while the "production" phase of movie making might be highly predicatable, the whole process, start-to-finish, of making a movie really isn't.
It's the same thing with games. You can have a long "pre-production" phase where you are nailing down all of the core mechanics and getting key systems and pipelines working. This is less predictable because of the iteration required. At some point, you're into "production", where you're just churning out content, and that phase is much more predictable.
Granted, movies are more predictable than games, but it's not quite such a big gap as you might first suppose.