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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that actually holds, or at least we would need to split up the games industry to see how it applies. If we're talking about games specifically designed for long-term play and ongoing updates (Dota 2, CS:Go, Fortnite, etc.) then yes I agree. If we're talking about your standard AAA releases likes CoD: whatever or most indie games, it's generally a "get it out the damn door" situation because the sales graph is extremely downward sloping over time.

There's also a bias in here because if you're using "old" games like AoE II as examples, they were released back in the day before patches were really an accepted thing, so there was a lot more effort that went into solidifying a game before it went gold than there is today.

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There's lots of indie games that get tons of updates, too. Minecraft is the big one in this space that kinda defined the model, Factorio is one of them too. Dwarf Fortress has had regular updates since 2006.

Get a playable version of the core game into Early Access for a low price, start releasing updates. Your player base provides feedback on the game as it evolves, free beta testing, and growing word-of-mouth promotion. Maybe even ideas for entire systems, especially if you have mod support. Eventually you expand it to have all the stuff that was in your original vision, and you bump the price up for the 1.0 release. Port it to consoles, decide if you want to keep on adding new content to make it the game you barely dared to dream it could be, or move on to the next project.

There's still people who keep a game quiet until they can release 1.0, but there's a lot of small games out there that get their stuff out in public as soon as possible.

Factorio is still Early Access, 3.5 years and going strong.

That's for the Steam release, the initial crowdfunding itself is 6.5 years old : https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/factorio#/updates/all

Similarly, a lot of games built with Valve's Source engine get continual updates even today - a decade or more after release - specifically because Source gets updates and therefore so do the games built on it. It's interesting to see updates come in for Half Life 2: Deathmatch even though absolutely nothing player-facing has changed (to my knowledge) since the 00's.

The game engine is reused between most games in a series, e.g. CoD, so there is still an incentive to invest there. They skimp on story/art/content though.

Minecraft is already more than 10 years old

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