How do you feel about the quarterly releases? Are you still glad that you committed to them, or are you regretting deciding to do them?
TL;DRChris Roberts says the quarterly releases are really good, giving production discipline and cadence and keeping the playable game a live product, though moving features out upsets players.
I think the quarterly releases are really good. They're great for discipline and cadence on the production side. Sometimes it's tough because you have to move things out and you know that people are going to be upset. Every time things move, the pitchforks are out: I'm not playing. Well, screw this. I'm not playing till 3.3 or 3.4 or wherever they think the next feature is going to come in. But no, I think it's good. And it is actually something consciously that we started last year after sort of taking so long with 3.0, and we just said we don't want to do this again. So we said, this is not a short distance race, it's a long distance race, and we've got a lot of stuff still to do, and we're building a universe at a level of detail I never thought that we would ever build in my wildest dreams when we first started this project. Things have happened to enable us, including the support we've had from everyone and some of the technological breakthroughs that we've had and just the general sort of power of PCs that are allowing us to do that. And so I think it's really important to focus on giving gameplay and content regularly to the community to play, and we sort of view Star Citizen that you play right now as a live product. Yes, it's missing loads of stuff and it's going to get all that stuff, but we need that experience to be good, and there's a discipline that comes with that that I think ultimately will make a much better final product. I think it's really good. It's good for the teams. Again, it's a cadence to get used to. The date doesn't move, so they have to make it, and it causes people to be realistic about what they can and can't do, and then we have to make tough decisions if it looks like the team's trajectory isn't going to deliver the feature that we said, and then we'll move it. I think it works really well for Star Citizen. And also, even if we said, okay, this is what we consider the full final game, it's the kind of cadence we would want afterwards anyway. I think you don't want to go a year or two years between updates like you can see on something like World of Warcraft. I think you want to have these quarterly content and feature updates where the universe, the game is evolving all the time.