It’s true that nowadays, developers are increasingly launching their games before they are “finished,” especially in the social gaming space (but really, this is true in the digital download space as well… lots of developers are exposing their prototypes to the world in hopes of early traction/feedback.) I’m a big fan of this and want to encourage it.

However, a “release early / release often” development strategy doesn’t necessarily imply that you must submit your game to competitions like the IGF “early”… the strategy has more to do with how you engage the *public*. (In other words, it might only be the third or fourth public iteration of your game that is actually good enough to win a competition.)

More to the point, remember that I’m explicitly *not* recommending that developers wait until they have several hours of polished gameplay — I’m saying that *ten minutes* of polished gameplay is better (for the purposes of a competition) than several hours of mediocre gameplay. So a developer who wants to release “early/often” and submit “early” to the IGF should still do so, as long as they polish at least one key portion of their game.

But increasingly, the money seems to be moving towards persistent games (on Facebook and elsewhere) where the game doesn’t have to be finished before it is released. Both Playfish and Zynga estimate that they launch a game when it is 20% finished.

Perhaps we’ll see more indie game developers going that way? And if we do, how will those indie games get judged?