No, it also increases value to the customer, and therefore price. It also helps you stay ahead of the competition, also increasing price.

Can you elaborate on PUBG?

If you have a live game that you intend to last a long time, it’s extremely important to establish a reliable release cadence that the players can depend on.

Our company first released our game in 2012. After release we didn’t know how important this is. We just kinda made updates and released them when we finished them.

The player numbers never went above what we had at release. For a few years our numbers were pretty flat. We would have up releases and down releases but we never broke our initial numbers.

Then we changed to a cycle of having a release every 3 months.

This was a massive improvement. Most players won’t keep playing your game continuously forever, but if they always know that there will be a thing to come back for, and when that will be, they will stop playing before they are burned out with a plan to come back.

Suddenly our numbers grew with every release. Each 3 month cycle saw a large percentage increase over the previous one.

After a few years of that our game is massively larger than it was at release, and it’s still growing with each subsequent release.

I’m not saying that it’s okay to release a buggy game, you have to scope each release so that you can do it on time without being too buggy. What I am saying is that the release schedule is actually really really important.

A wonderful insight, thanks.

I guess that hints in a direction where "both are Right". For the technical teams, it's self-explanatory that "one does not simply push out crap". On the other hand, the MBAs and finance hear engineering say the same thing about mostly everything, and double profit margin is double profit margin, so the incentive structures that encourage faster releases probably seem completely plausible to them.

Not that things are that clear and clean in real life. But having drifted from pure engineering to engineering management during the years, I feel more and more sympathy towards some of the challenges of the "ugly and evil business side" by the year. Also, nothing is as hard as communication. Except trying to communicate goals with broad incentive structures, I guess.

You mean, the bug-laden beta build they pushed out before Christmas and are selling for full price? Yes, I'm sure they made plenty of money, but they also hurt their reputation.