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Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

In the old days, customers would never be able to get their hands on video game prototypes. You had one shot. Today, it's obviously a bit different, though many companies still treat it like one shot anyway.

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Sure they would.

Game studios were one of the first areas to care for UX.

During the 80's and early 90's many kids got into games by starting as group testers after school.

At that point, they were insiders or even employees, not final customers, no? Games were released onto cartridges that couldn't be updated once the cartridges were manufactured and in the customer's hands.

Insiders if you will, studios would get the kids into a room to play test ongoing development.

It wasn't always the same group of kids.

Yeah, but even in the old days the developers would still be prototyping. Internal stakeholders are still stakeholders, and it’s developers optimizing for things other than speed. Nintendo devs famously build nothing until Mario’s jump (the MVP) feels right.

Yeah, but my point was that once it was in a cartridge in a customer's home, there wasn't anything that the company could do to update it. They certainly didn't send their customers copies of the prototypes. Whether or not companies ate their own dog food doesn't change the crux of my point.

Yeah, but the original point you were responding to was endorsing the idea that “you should invest time in optimizing/performance last, and focus on making something people want to use first.” I’m saying your point that videogames have to be performant at the end is irrelevant to the point at hand because that’s exactly what the games industry does, they prototype without care to optimization to make something worth optimizing—i.e. something internal stakeholders reasonably believed there would be a market for.

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