My initial reaction to your comment was to snort and roll my eyes, but I am sincerely curious: can you name any similar games that found success by building an MVP and evolving into a sophisticated MMPORG?
I am just talking out of my ass here, but I could see an argument for the "build big and go live" strategy being more an affectation of the single player focused studio system than a mmo best practice. at least for the traditional pc/3d style mmos it is much easier to find gross examples of pre-launch implosion, launching years late, launching alpha quality etc. than it is to find the opposite. Yet almost all of those games seem to enjoy a core fanbase often for years before they launch that would be all over an mvp. i can certainly see how launching with a small amount of content could be a big risk, but there are clearly a lot of problems with aaa title dev that a launch and iterate approach might be helpful for.
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My initial reaction to your comment was to snort and roll my eyes, but I am sincerely curious: can you name any similar games that found success by building an MVP and evolving into a sophisticated MMPORG?
I doubt there are too many, but from memory these guys pretty much did exactly that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_in_the_Desert
I am just talking out of my ass here, but I could see an argument for the "build big and go live" strategy being more an affectation of the single player focused studio system than a mmo best practice. at least for the traditional pc/3d style mmos it is much easier to find gross examples of pre-launch implosion, launching years late, launching alpha quality etc. than it is to find the opposite. Yet almost all of those games seem to enjoy a core fanbase often for years before they launch that would be all over an mvp. i can certainly see how launching with a small amount of content could be a big risk, but there are clearly a lot of problems with aaa title dev that a launch and iterate approach might be helpful for.
RuneScape was initially developed by two people and has grown to become extremely successful.