For software you should make something - any part - work and release it. Then do regular feature releases after that.

If you are not working alone you can ask your marketing people for help, sometimes it is worth waiting for a big bang release, sometimes not (For some things if you miss Christmas you should delay until next Christmas). I recommend you err on the side of release too soon - customers are the ultimate answer, if their feedback on what is important is useful to have (but their feedback is not always correct!)

This doesn't work so well for video games. Reviews come out saying its thin on content with a score to match and can kill a game before its had a chance to expand. Developers have started trying to do this more often lately with mixed results, DICE and Blizzard are high profile examples of this. Blizzards latest World of Warcraft expansion was heavily criticized for the lack of content on release day and has yet to shake the bad blood even after two big content patches. DICE tried this with Star Wars Battlefront but couldn't keep fans long enough with the limited maps it released with.

It doesn't work for AAA games, but it can work really well for indie games. Think of something like Factorio, where version 0.1 looked like this:

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-184

Then they just kept releasing every week for 7 years, and now you have people building CPUs and explaining Apache Kafka with it.

Ostriv is another recent game that comes to mind as having a similar development cycle. Also many F2P MMOs - most of the non-Blizzard online games I know do regular releases that frequently change the game mechanics (often, to a big player uproar) but still keep their userbase. Fortnight and Pokemon Go are two big ones here.

Lots of games come out in early beta now and raise money through sales as they are developed. It is a better model than crowdfunding for games, because you start from a demonstration of competence in game development and you (usually) have direct view into the development process.

While we're on the topic of Factorio, I find that even from a Factorio player's perspective, the OP is good advice. I've wasted so much time trying to build the perfect base and starting over after building myself into a corner, when really I should have just built something that works "right now" and make iterative improvements over time.

Not just videogames, it's also a terrible strategy for something like self-driving cars or medicine, where "Move fast & break things" ends up breaking people.

The problem is people want a simple, one-size-fits-all mental model of what an MVP is.

Different industries, different problems, different solutions = different definitions of what an MVP will and can be.

Most of this entire discussion is useless.

You are right, but the situations with wow and battlefront are a bit more complex than that. Wow was more due to unfun mechanics and poor reward systems than lack of content (though that was a factor). Also battlefront had a size-able protest due to pricing disagreements. Both of which are dependent on community so as it diminishes it rolls downhill fast.

I'm trying it with my indie game. We'll see it works, but I realized Danger World (https://danger.world) at the end of January this year, and multiplayer is still under active development.

Which is why I said sometimes it is worth waiting for a big bang release. You need to understand your product and customers.

The counter-example here would be fortnight.

With videogames in the cloud, you can release the first level, then work on the next level.

You can even make it so that players can't reach the end of level 1 before you've completed level 2 :)

God, that sounds absolutely awful.

Considering the garbage fire state of modern technology, I am not convinced this idea is a good one.

coughs Chinese Democracy cough

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I was referring to the Guns N' Roses album.