Releasing it when it is ready rather than releasing it to release it is probably better in this case. Especially if the creator ever plans on other 4D game projects, since he has his own game engine to create them now. Better to not have someone's first experience with a 4D game be "This was garbage." in that case.
For games pushing a new gimmick this seems even more true, and especially the idea of iterating on things that maybe aren't even quite "good" in order to learn more and eventually understand how to make something great even if a lot of the time greatness seems accidental. Two examples come to mind... Doom was made in a year, but was a culmination of even shorter projects successively refining what FPS meant. Portal was done in a little over 2 years, but was also built on the experience of Digipen students' project game that introduced the gimmick mechanic along with others at Valve with experience making FPSes (along with some writers who knew what they were doing).
Unfortunately, at least my tastes and expectations in games have changed in the intervening 15 years, and it no longer suited them at all.
If only the game was as good as the 2001 E3 trailer.
Then Gearbox stepped in, wrapped it up in near passable form and shipped it. But the final product is very clearly not a good game. Level design is bad, graphics are terribly inconsistent, ranging from looking modern for its time to looking ten years dated. Gameplay is poorly balanced and the pacing is just not there.
I loved Duke Nukem 3D and was very much looking forward to Forever when it was announced. By the time it launched I had no expectations on it and bought it as a fun thing. It's amusing that they wrapped it up and published it, but it's not a finished game.
What it is, however, is fodder for some great conversation at work when we're discussing project management.
For a puzzle game, I would say that there's less risk for that, although I do recall other games copying the 4D mechanic since.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbp9m4/what-happened-to-r...
That's not totally true anymore when you have access to an update system as part of the platform. No Man's Sky is one example.
I know many others, and myself, who won't be playing Fallout:76 or No Man's Sky because both games were colossal train wrecks on launch that over-promised (or over-hyped) and under-delivered. It doesn't matter much if these issues are eventually fixed, most of the player base will have already moved on. Some many go back and try it out when they hear "it's better now" but many won't.
The games will be remembered poorly by most people, even if they eventually do become good and that is what the quote means.
They only brought multiplayer support a couple months ago. Honestly, this was one of those too little too late kind of things.
One of the key challenges is that it is so hard to distinguish the first case from the last. In practice, there are many more games that never get finished than those that do.
Remember Narbacular Drop? You probably don't, because it was a clunky free game with bad graphics.
Remember Portal? That was made by the same devs, when Valve hired them after seeing Narbacular Drop's seamless teleportation mechanics.