It's "release early, release often" but I guess it doesn't matter much.<p>Speaking as a former founder of a video games company, I think that this kind of thinking is inherent to the entire industry and it is killing it. The inspiration clearly comes from the movie industry where admittedly, you don't make a movie in small iterations. As it stands now, triple-A titles have to make it to the top ten to be profitable due to extreme development costs which drives up marketing prices which in turn drives up the price of the games to the consumer. This spiral is really bad for the industry. I think that indie and small developers will take over most of the market because they do much smaller and more frequent releases.
Are there AAA game devs with 300 person teams who really think they can win without thorough documentation? WTF?<p>"Release early, release often" is for webapps and small teams. When you're dealing with a AAA game there is such a huge network effect it's actually crucial to make the first release a good release. You then get all the word-of-mouth which drives the game industry. Most AAA titles that ship with bugs pay for it dearly in sales because gamers talk to each other and word gets out in a few days about just how finished the game is.<p>"Release early, release often" can't possibly apply to AAA games with 300 person teams and fixed launch dates.
i think there are salient advantages to preferring to fail over documentation---which is about getting the implementation right before time-consuming bugs or poor code are introduced--and preferring to "fail fast"---which is about not investing in a product the market doesn't support.
He advocates moving failures upstream to the design process because it is cheaper than failing during the development process. While that is true, it's not an either or proposition. There is no reason you can't fail early and often in each stage of the process.