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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

I expected this article to just recover some old material, but it actually raises some interesting points.

In particular, working on games, I believe (like with films), I don't think "release early, release often" is a good idea.

It might work with massive multiplayer games, where users tend to keep re-exploring the same content, but in general with games once someone has played a game once they don't tend to want to play it again.

I tried "release early, release often" with an iPhone game I wrote, and it was a mistake. The biggest problem is that users get angry if you take away, or significantly change, content from users. That's reasonable, but it means once you have added a level it is hard to take it away, even if you have a new, better level to replace it with.

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Indeed. That's why 'small increments' are key there: as you say, don't significantly change content.

Blizzard have always followed this philosophy with their game balance changes: they make very small changes each patch. They are so careful that often, the effect they are trying to achieve won't be hit until after several patches. See, for example, druid effectiveness in Player-versus-Player: it's steadily, but very slowly, decreased since The Burning Crusade, as a result of druids being (perceived?) too good at surviving.

I mostly kept my Android game's existing content the same. The only changes I made were to slightly decrease difficulty each patch, as some areas were definitely too hard (the first boss could take up to 10 tries to kill, no matter what you did :).

One thing that users really love though is the release of a large chunk of content in one patch - e.g. a brand new area to explore. I don't think this translates well to websites or webapps - no matter how much of a killer 'feature', users can be very cynical or underwhelmed.

Finally, in enterprise software development, you need to be very careful with rapid release cycles as corporations are very dependent on the stability of your product, even if it's internal.

Horses for courses. The bottom line is to use the best strategy for the job.

> In particular, working on games, I believe (like with films), I don't think "release early, release often" is a good idea.

Although, as a counterpoint "release early, release often" works well for Minecraft.

It worked great for Minecraft: many ideas from the mod community were siphoned back into the main game.

The iPhone does make this difficult, as a release usually takes one week to go through Apple's approval system. Therefore you can't make mistake today and fix it tomorrow.

This is what the Android market is good for. However the stores are different, so lessons learned on the Market may not suit your iPhone audience.

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