I announced the sequel to my first game a long time ago, and since then I've had lots of people ask how the development is going. My problem is now I feel like I'm under pressure to release the game as soon as possible, and I'm under pressure to make sure the game is worth the wait.

I've not been pushing the game too heavily, but recently I've been feeling like I've promised people this new game, and now am forced to produce it.

So from now on I'm not going to announce any games till their at least 90% complete. What does everyone else think?, is announcing a game before it's even half complete a good idea?, or does it put too much pressure on the developer?

I learned this lesson too and prefer not to pre-announce new titles at all now. At best I might pre-announce them once they're in beta testing and the light at the end of the tunnel is clear. I've never seen any factual data that pre-announcing games has a positive effect on sales. Maybe for retail titles, but it's doubtful for indie games. The only effect I've seen from pre-announcing games is an increase in the support burden. IMHO it's better to save all that marketing energy for when people can actually buy the game.

I also sort of wonder if there's a psychological factor at work here. If you're putting time and energy into pre-announcing a game, why are you bothering with that instead of working on it? Are you trying to sell your potential customers on the game, or are you really trying to sell yourself on the idea that you'll actually finish it? I've seen a lot of developers pre-announce games where I suspect they're actually doing mostly the latter.

Man, I wish I knew the answer to that one. I wasn't planning on going public with my game until it was beta, and then some marketing-savvy folks convinced me that you want to have much larger lead time on this kind of thing. It's a fine line between announcing it too early and being considered vaporware, and announcing it too late and not being able to take advantage of a build-up of expectation.

90% complete sounds like a good idea to me... once you are RELATIVELY certain of your expected release date. But the other problem you'll run into is finding your time divided between working on getting your game out the door, and doing marketing / PR stuff. Both are important.

Hopefully Joe can weigh in here with some more useful information. All I have are more questions.

Getting pressure after announcing something (an event, a game, etc.) is a problem in every aspect of one's life.

Whenever I tell friends and family about something I haven't yet completed, but in the process of doing or waiting for a result, I feel the same pressure.

Examples:

* Announcing that you applied for grad school, but didn't hear from the school yet. This one is especially bad if you were to get rejected. Every single person you mentioned this to will ask you, and every time you say "No I wasn't accepted", you will relive the tragic experience of getting rejected. :)

* Announcing a game/application or business before actually being ready to show it. Same as above.. If you can never finish it, everytime someone asks you about it, you will feel guilty and unsuccessful.

* Announcing that you are expecting a promotion at work in your upcoming evaluation. Well even if you are 100% sure, just wait until you get it because if you don't, it will feel horrible, and it will keep feeling horrible every time someone you mentioned it to asks you "Did you get that promotion?".

Who needs that kind of pressure?!

So the moral of the story is, mention things to people that you can show something for. Do NOT ever tell half-baked things unless you are ready to face the consequences. If things go sour with your half-baked thing, and it never fully cooks, every person you mentioned it to will cause you to re-experience whatever it is that went wrong.

Food for thought... :)

In general I agree with Dexterity.

I would like to add one type of scenario where announcing ASAP is not bad.

That scenario is business people. Any business to business contact.

It is a matter of risk vs. reward in each scenario, the risk is that your reputation will be damaged if you fail to produce. The reward is the more you can hammer this idea in to their heads, the more likely they may be to offer whatever service you are seeking.

Consumers should NOT be told until you are very certain of a release timeframe. I would say 90% sure of release and 75% complete... or so.

Joseph Lieberman

Originally posted by Terin
Consumers should NOT be told until you are very certain of a release timeframe. I would say 90% sure of release and 75% complete... or so.

Joseph Lieberman

Isn't there an 80/20 rule in software development? I think it goes like this: The first 80% of the project takes 20% (or less) of the total development time. However the remaining 20%, takes 80% (or more) of the total development time.

I think it has something to do with the psychology of developers. When they feel closer to the end, they really are not for some reason and the project ends up taking a lot longer than they expected.

Perhaps it doesn't apply when all the details of the project has been laid out beforehand, and everything is accounted for.

I personally think there are always unknowns that can set you back no matter how much planning you do although planning well keeps the time lost to unknown problems to a minimum.

I guess the more experienced you are (like Dexterity), the better you are when it comes to judging when you can make the announcements and avoid embarrassment.

I've been struggling with this as well.

Like others here, I've been burnt in the past by announcing projects too early. It just adds a lot of unecessary stress when you have tons of people asking "when is it coming out?".

Also, as someone else mentioned, nothing is worse than announcing a cool feature only for it to be pulled from the final game.

Another problem with showing/announcing a game too early is that it leaves too much room for suggestions. What I mean is when you show a game that's only 30-40% complete, you have people coming out of the wood work saying, "You should implement feature 'X'!!!", or "It would be cool if the character had a super duper big gun and blow up things!!!"

I have no problem with receiving suggestions, but if you show-off your game when it's more complete, you'll end up getting better refined suggestions. If you show your game too early often times you end up getting random game ideas thrown on top of your game. This can also be frustrating for you because then you feel like the game isn't living up to people's expectations if certain features aren't added.

Though Terin does have a good point about pre-announcing being good for certain business to business contacts. But even in those circumstances you want to have something substantial to show for it to be effective.

With that said, I'll probably try to get my game previewed in the Indie circuit and a few other small gaming sites. Since this is my first game, I have no previous customers to draw from. So I want to try to build up at least a little momentum and interest for the first couple of months of sales. Regardless though I won't be announcing my game until I have the final release date down to a two-week error margin. This probably means the game will be > 80% complete when I show it off.

Also, I definitely agree you should focus on the majority of your promotion when you actually have something to sell.

When you are a first-time (and maybe even second-time) developer, that's certainly true. When you have experience you just learn to pad your schedule because you KNOW it's going to take at least 50% longer than you think... :)

But your guesses do get closer. One of the problems with any kind of software development - and especially games - is that you can go from zero to something that resembles a finished product VERY quickly. It's easy to look at how quickly you made so much progress and assume that you are on the home stretch, when really you haven't hit the halfway mark yet. The frustrating part comes right after that, when you think you are about 50 - 75% complete and just need some "details worked out", and most of your progress is invisible. And that's where a lot of hobbyist developers give up, I think. Then when your project is REALLY at the 90% stage, suddenly everything starts coming together again in a hurry and you can make a sprint to the finish line.

Which is where you have to test & fix like crazy and things become slow again. But that's the way it goes.

Considering the differences in the sales cycle between retail in indie games, I don't really see any compelling reason to pre-announce your game before beta testing.

I'd say you are virtually always better off just waiting and then dropping a finished or very nearly finished game into an unsuspecting market. It isn't like the retail market, where retailers are going to rip your game off the shelf if it doesn't sell a thousand copies the first weekend...

I meant 75% in terms of time to completion, if you can't tell what that is...well, that is hardly my fault :-).

There is a reason, I think, GFM, and that is to create an increased level of interest on your initial release. If you can build up interest in the 2 months before launch or, when you launch, if you get decent coverage of your launch, you can create a strong synergy between advertising, publicity, word of mouth, and media relations. "new" is a strong word, and by not building up that market you are deflating the power of "new" amongst other things.

It partially depends on your product too. A game designed for casual users is much harder to build up publicity, because casual gamers don't really read game news sites where they may see a preview or screenshot. I tend to think in terms of mainstream.

Joseph Lieberman