Joe Ludwig has been talking about continuous deployment recently. The basic goals of continuous deployment are two-fold: minimize downtime, and minimize the time between writing code and finding out it's wrong (it could be wrong for a lot of reasons, not just bugs).
An interesting counterpoint came from Ben Ziegler a couple of weeks later (I'm just following the trend in writing my take on the subject a couple more weeks on), arguing that downtime - and bugs, and lag - just don't matter.
First, let me point out that this isn't a new discussion, by any means. As of this writing, Bug Free Doesn't Sell is a wiki article last edited almost three years ago... on this exact subject1.
On the one hand, I think Ben is right: "Stable, fast, fun. In that order" is not a mantra for a great game. "Fun. probably stable, and fast enough" is a better mantra. It's hard to see the direct benefit to maximizing stability and minimizing downtime, and it's always possible to over-think technical challenges and lose focus on the game itself in solving them.
On the other hand, I think there are a lot of indirect benefits. Doing things right attracts people who are interested in solving new problems (or old problems better), it reduces operational overhead (manual steps and emergency downtime require hands on deck - costs I'm probably more aware of, having worked down the hall from NCsoft operational staff), and it's another defense against the motivation-sapping attitude "nothing works right around here."
Hell, to some extent, you don't even have to succeed at minimizing downtime to see the benefits (c.f. Blizzard's launch of World of Warcraft). Mistakes were made, but they came more from inexperience in MMOGs specifically than bad culture, lack of investment, or having bad programmers. Now, though, that doesn't really apply; we have to create technical failures in other ways. We know better than to make the same mistakes, we'll recognize the same old mistakes coming... and if we do nothing but let them wash over us, we'll see our motivation and investment in the game disappear.
And then the game will suck, and people will argue about whether the problems were technical or not.
1. Incidentally, any programmers who aren't familiar with the Portland Pattern Repository's Wiki - it might be the oldest web-based programmer community around, and is the original Wiki. It can be hard to read at times, but there is a ton of stuff and it's easy to get lost in there for hours.
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