Valve seems to have an interesting solution of their own to this problem, which is just to not tell anyone that they’re working on a game until it’s basically done. This removes the pressure on them to meet a certain deadline, but it doesn’t look very good from a public perspective. But it might be better in some cases than a Star Citizen scenario.

Valve barely ever releases anything. This means that players don't get shitty rushed games, but it also means that players get no games and the company gets no money. That's only realistic for a company like Valve, which earns in a minute what Star Citizen earns in a year.

A company/studio that actually needs to make games to survive can't afford to be perfectionists.

Before Half-Life: Alyx last year, Valve hadn't released a major game since Dota 2 in 2013. I wouldn't call that a solved problem.

Valve also basically have the entire PC gaming industry pay them rent. They could just work on Steam for the next 100 years and not want for money. That creates some pretty bad incentives, which coupled with their very informal management style can lead to the current situation. If rumours are to be believed, something is being done internally to address the problem and turn them back into a videogame company. I would personally love to see the Steam team split off into a completely separate entity, but I can see why that won't happen. In short, Valve's premiere product is a software delivery platform, and they sometimes spend some money to make a videogame. Sometimes that videogame even gets released.

I believe this is the way to go. There's a cycle that sets in once you set expectations and open a project up for public feedback. In the SC case, it means you're never finished; in the CD Projekt case it means no one is satisfied when you ship. It's not that a game can't live up to expectations, it's that the goalposts move further the longer it is left to the public imagination. tl;dr I think fan service is what kills projects. In the end, it isn't what makes or breaks a great game. But the temptation to hype what you're working on - and raise money from pre-sales, which requires constant fan pleasing - is hard to resist.

> Surely there's some happy medium.

Hollow Knight's release schedule was (at least partially) determined by the founders running out of money. Seems to have worked ok for this one.

The sequel is still in the making.

You might like https://www.gwern.net/reviews/Anime#on-development-hell

Well, to be fair, Star Citizen has a massive financial incentive to trickle out paid content without releasing. The day they release is the day they cut the goose that lays golden eggs for them. Sure, they'll sell the meat, but those golden eggs are never coming back.

Yeah, it's evolved into an absurd and mercifully very unusual/difficult to imitate business model. But in my (early) experience on the project, the model of selling content to a nonexistent game was something Chris Roberts very much stumbled into by accident. When I started working with him I'm sure it never occurred to him that such a thing could even be lucrative. CR was extremely deadline-driven until the crowd funding and the fan forums got into it. Prior to that, it was specific goals, limits, milestones, and a pathway to launching ASAP. In a sense, the crowd preferred being strung along, or at least sending resources to things that would delay development in exchange for some holy grail down the road. The shift was profound when it happened. SC is a bad example for most things, because it really was started with the best of intentions but became such a shitshow that most people assume it was intended as a con from day one.

Oh, I believe that they didn't start with this in mind, absolutely. To some extent, the whole thing seems to be a victim of its own massive crowdfunding success.

Basically nothing they release now could ever live up to the hopes, so even without the profit motive, the incentives would lead to endless moving goalposts...