What do you consider an unfinished product?

[midrange]

Cool thread.
Unfortunately I do not think there is a very clear cut answer. Ultimately an unfinished game to me is one that provides a heavily inferior product to what should be the norm in that genre (price can affect this). To illustrate my point, i will provide 3 examples:

1) a game can have bugs. In fact, most games will have bugs due to the fact that there are major coding projects involved in making a game. This does not mean that a game is unfinished. Take super smash bros melee. Wavedashing is perhaps the most notable bug (sakurai saying it wasn't supposed to be in the game), but it is a bug that has skyrocketed the melee competitive scene and has, quite frankly, added to the melee experience. Super mario 64 also had the backwards staircase glitch, but that instead added to the competitive speed run scene. Noone is calling those two games unfinished.

2) a finished product is not set by the guidelines of the maker. Take project cars on wii u. They have the game running at 23 fps. SMS could have set that as there goal and called it a day, after all, there are no bugs with it and it still has the 'core' project cars experience. But they know that to do that would be to release an unfinished product, because that framerate is not a standard in most racing simulators. So they made the decision to notify people about it instead of selling it.

3) a product is determined finished by what is comparable to it upon release. Splatoon is not finished in its current state. I can make a comparison chart between the $40-$60 splatoon and the $20 black ops 2, and we will see one heavily out weigh the other. The comparison doesn't have to be black ops 2, it could be titanfall, or destiny, or halo, or borderlands, or ... the list goes on. No splatoon does not have to be as content packed as those games, but when voice chat is a standard, when customizable local matches is a standard, when over 5 maps is a standard, one can argue that splatoon does not reach a standard in the shooter genre and can therefore be argued as unfinished.