Do you like how the quarterly releases are working? And what would you change?
TL;DRRoberts likes the quarterly releases because they give the team focus, discipline, honesty about what will make it, and better stability, and they keep the community engaged.
No, I do like how the quarterly releases are working, because I feel like it gives the team a focus that is near enough. Because the problem is when you work on things that are way in the distance, it's very easy to think you've got lots of time, and then all of a sudden it rushes up on you and you're like, "Oh, we haven't done all this stuff." So it's making us much more disciplined and much more focused about delivering the features and also being more honest earlier on about whether the feature is going to make it. Because the thing is, best laid plans of mice and men, you'll say, "Okay, we're going to get all these things done," then you get into it and you find out, "Oh, well, this is taking longer than we thought," or there's some tech that we didn't realize we needed to build, or this developer got sick and so he's now put us behind schedule. And so things definitely move, and having the discipline of having to get a release out every quarter I think really helps. It also keeps the game much more stable, because, for instance, when we had 3.0, and it was essentially almost a year of development, there was a lot of work that had to go in to just get it stable. And even when we released 3.0, it wasn't nearly as stable as it should be. And if you look at 3.2, it's much more stable than 3.0 was, and even more than 3.1. And so I think releasing frequently helps with the stability. And I think people like to see the progress. I think it's good for the community. I definitely see there's this cycle where [a new release] comes out, everyone plays, amazing screenshots, great videos, everyone's super excited, positivity everywhere. It doesn't matter where you are, on Spectrum or Reddit, it's amazing. And then after a little while, people get bored, and then there's concern threads and all the rest of the stuff starts to go. And then, of course, the next one goes to PTU and people start to get excited again. So I prefer to have the get-bored section be much shorter, and people get to play and engage and see the regular stuff. And so I'm a big fan of it. I think it's caused the development teams to have a lot more discipline. So yeah, I'm really happy. I know Erin's happy. I think most of our development is pretty happy, because you feel like you're making progress. You're getting things out there.