Not necessarily. There are other developers who give guess dates on upcoming updates via their community managers, who also give a sense of just how imprecise the guess actually is in Youtube announcement vids. I’m thinking specifically of Coffee Stain and how they have managed Satisfactory’s development (I know, total genre bender compared to Darktide). Overcommunicating, even when they are wrong and have to backtrack, is always better. The community RAVES about the CMs and the level of communication from the company even when they have to shrug their shoulders and say, “We messed up. Here’s the NEW new guess date.” It helps that they explain what, exactly, they are struggling with, such as a port to a new game engine going worse than they anticipated.
Yep. Take a look at this roadmap (notice how the dates are rough estimates):
The reason why dates are not specific is because of how much testing goes in-between and how long it takes to address certain design inconsistencies, or weird bugs, that may pop up during the implementation of new stuff. That, and also, some developer gets the idea of adding new things that he likes to see when he’s done with his workload. Then you get another trial of bug testing to go through to make sure that new mechanic being added didn’t break anything in the game. Then another dev gets another idea to add new things because he’s bored and wants to rework the foliage. Then another dev decides today is the day to rework the entire leveling progression because he didn’t like how it felt; and oh would you look at the time, we’re way past schedule!
Then fans sit and wonder: oi where’s muh patch u silly dev team!
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