[pandaman]

Some might, but it's not a common business model. Most game studios work for publishers and they sell the game continuously in form of milestones. Even a studio owned by publisher has to continuously deliver or it will be shut down. Twitter, which I am comparing to, just gets money on the promise of the future profits. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't believe it has any software deliverables it has to meet every quarter in order to make payroll.

[hythloday]

Twitter, now, sells advertising, which is 90% of its revenue. While it was VC-funded, which is really what you should be comparing it to as it's the prevalent stage of an startup, it raised money from VC funds by hitting non-contractual milestones in terms of MAU/DAU increases. I don't think that's particularly different to the milestone model that's prevalent in games - a third party pours money incrementally into the development of a product contingent on the mutually agreeable evolution of the product.

Unless you're in the habit of delivering RC-quality milestones (which is afaik unheard of in AAA development), the marginal value of a milestone is negative right up until the last one.

[pandaman]

I am sorry, it seems that my point is completely lost behind snark. Let me put it straight then.

The argument in this thread is that games industry is somehow behind times and not using the best practices used at places such as Twitter. The question is - how do you know your practices are the best and not the other way around?

Game studios go out of business if they don't deliver quality software on time and on budget. I know it first hand since I have been through several studio closures. The practices game studios use are tested through natural selection - if they fail at delivering software they are out of business. To make things more interesting there is also competition: a good game decimates sales of the worse games released around the same time. And if the sales go below the projected ROI - it's the game over. So it's not enough to be good enough to survive, you need to be better than the competition.

Trendy web companies don't sell software. They sell services and the quality of software they use is secondary. E.g. if I wrote a Facebook's clone but 100 times faster, using 10 times less memory and with 1/1000th of Facebook's staff it would not threaten Facebook. People would not close their accounts and move to my network just because I have better software. A web company is fine as long as their website runs semi-reliably.

So how come the battle-tested practices of the games industry are so bad compared to the practices of the industry, which mostly sells advertisement? What are the criteria you use to compare?

[emelef]

Games are more like web products than you think, I'd say. If you come up with a game-stack: 3d engine, netcode, the works, that vastly outperforms a game like League of Legends, that does nothing to threaten them either.

I'm not siding with this notion that Twitter (or webdev in general) is ahead, mind you, but it's fair to say that neither websites nor games are about selling software. They're more about entertainment.

[pandaman]

You are right, f2p games are a lot like web - they sell service, not software. Interestingly, these companies look a lot like web firms - thousands of people working on the product, which barely changes and, I've heard, using the same programming practices. This is not what people mean when talk about games industry.