[spatulon]

Generally and traditionally, no. You're probably right about the requirements for getting into the various digital distribution outlets, but it seems that gamers are willing to forgive a lot of problems and missing polish for the chance to play something while it's still in development.

For example, I think Minecraft is a great example of a MVP, although I admit it's an unusual case. The developer started on it in May 2009 and as far as I know it was available to play or buy within a few weeks of that. It's now making a lot of money, as I'm sure you're aware.

Valve's efforts with TF2 were a step in the MVP direction. It was in development for years and years before a massively marketed release upon completion - so in that sense nothing like MVP - but the fact that they then kept on developing it and new people kept on buying it showed that games don't necessarily have to be this big "release and forget" deal where a slow start dooms the product to complete failure.

Realtime Worlds recently collapsed after taking $100m in venture capital and then releasing APB to mediocre reviews and terrible sales. What if they had been selling alpha versions of the game all along? Perhaps they would have slowly picked up fans over a long period rather than relying on the huge marketing push to find a critical mass of fans in a narrow time window before the world moved onto the next big thing. Perhaps the earlier feedback could have alerted them to the game's problems and given them the chance to pivot. Perhaps they could have seen the game's failure coming and given up before wasting quite so much money.

[joshuacc]

Another example of MVPs in gaming are the guys at Wolfire. They are developing a game called Overgrowth and releasing weekly alphas to those who preorder, thereby funding the development as they go along.

They were also part of the huge Humble Indie Bundle, so it's fair to say they're doing pretty well on the marketing/money front.