The epic demise of Realtime Worlds, maker of Crackdown & APB (opens in new tab)

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."

(http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail40...)

Beware of the dreaded Second System Effect?

As I understood it, the APB that launched was far, far beyond an MVP. It was the game equivalent of a deep-feature-set, enterprise-class product launch that simply hadn't been well-architected.

In APB's case, it likely would have been vastly preferable to launch with an MVP two or three years ago, the minimum viable product of APB being a game that's low on content but high on playability. Just as with non-game software, they should have concentrated on user experience first, with a small feature set, and have launched something that left the audience hungry for more, rather than deluging the player with content that isn't fun to play.

You gain a gaming audience's trust much faster promising that a fun and short game will get longer than promising that a long and un-fun game will get funner.

The real moral is not to release a shitty product. APB was a terrible product, marketing and all the other stuff aside, it just plain sucked.

"Minimal viable product" is context sensitive and dependent on competition. A hunk of sharp flint lashed to a stick might be a good minimal viable product in the ax market in 15,000 BC, but it's not today. The MMO space is filled with quite a lot of very robust, very polished competitors. To compete you either need to match that level of production quality or have a unique experience that is compelling enough to make up for it.

Well, that strategy seems to have worked for EVE Online. On the other hand, that's the only MMO I can think of that started small and kept growing successfully.

APB was a good game with a lot of potential but it was plagued by two issues. The first being a total lack of variety in regard to story content and the second being that the matchmaking system was horrible. When playing that game I was constantly paired up against people who were a much higher level effectively doing the same mission I had done a bunch of times already.

Or perhaps, don't launch with a minimal viable product with plans to improve it later unless you have a financial structure that allows you to stay in business for long enough to actually improve it.

To be clear, you're saying to avoid rushing to your Launch (marketing, press, boxes on shelves, etc), right, not to avoid showing it to customers?