[hibikir]

Of course it is. You can see the strategy of rapidly iterating on game mechanics first, for theoretically releasable, yet too crappy for the market, in interviews of old school devs: Sid Meier and Peter Molyneux built their first hits this way. Today we also see this approach in Early Access games on Steam.

The reason we don't see it everywhere though is because in AAA games, deadlines are seen as something so important that large parts of the game are built simultaneously. In your typical modern story-based action game, you have different teams working on different levels, and some people might spend all their time in just one or two levels: To get that level of parallelism, and have over 100 people working on a game, chances are that the development process will not have much to do with agile.

But many of the games that most people would consider great come from much love, refinement and iteration, along with relatively long development periods. This is why Blizzard always takes forever, and we have the concept of Valve Time.