Looking back at the public roadmap now, do you think this was the right call?
TL;DRErin Roberts thinks the public roadmap is a good thing, saying it exposes normal schedule changes, and that pushing features back to improve frame rate, fun and stability was the right decision, which will continue.
I actually think it's great. I think it's great putting it out there and everyone can see it. I think the process of us sharing exactly what we would like to do on the development side compared to actually what gets achieved is one of those things. But I kind of like the fact that people see that, because what's happening is basically what happens in every company, just behind closed doors. And so you set up a very aggressive schedule. You basically work very hard to hit it. Things come along that change stuff in the way and process, you evaluate, you change stuff around because basically you want to go a different direction. And then that, of course, reassesses the roadmap. So in terms of that kind of stuff, the roadmap's changed because you might say, well, actually, we want to go do this. We're going to make this feature. And then, as we did at the beginning of last year, we looked at this and we sort of said, okay, actually we want to do these features, but I actually want to put focus back in on making the game a bit more fun now, because we're trying to get through a bunch of features to deliver to the community, but we knew we needed to, obviously, improve the frame rate. We knew we needed to go and make features we created, and maybe go back and spend some more time on them to make them enjoyable and fun, to get the better user experience. And so that's some of the stuff we then changed around, and we made a change to do that, which meant that we pushed out some feature work to basically make the experience better. And I actually do feel it was completely the right decision, because if you look at the play experience now compared to a year ago, it's fundamentally different. And because of that, that's absolutely the trajectory that we're continuing on: we are still focusing on improving the frame rate, on improving and focusing on the gameplay of the features we put in when we didn't finish, stability, all that kind of stuff, to really make sure what we have and what's working now, and there's so much stuff you can do already, that that is a great experience, while at the same time plugging in the features as they come along to basically fit within that.