> There is less need for long term support as games are expected to meet its twilight much sooner.

I think this is true for the majority of games.

But I wonder if it remains true for the most successful.

e.g. GTA V released in 2013. Apparently as of 2018 it saw $6B in revenue. Though, surely a lot of this has to do with the new content they introduce to incentivize microtransactions.

Fortnite was a paid early-access game in July 2017, but had a free-to-play battle-royale mode by September 2017. Minecraft came out of beta in 2011.

I can agree with "just ship it, quality of code is not a concern" for an initial release. I wonder how much bad code affects big and successful products, though.

e.g. Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Breakpoint was very buggy, even though it looked like an iteration on the Ghost Recon Wildlands game just two years earlier.