I had a professor in University and ran what was called the "Media Lab" (if I remember correctly) and he did work on videogames (among other things). There were two core rules he taught to everyone he could:
- Always have a demo. Someone always wants to see what you're working on and it is (much) better to have a stable build from a couple of days ago than to show off some buggy code that you're currently debugging.
- Always implement something in its simplest form, with as little investment in unnecessary elements, because it is much easier to change if you come accross a problem.
If I were "King of EA" I would probably have a handfull of teams that are made up of a handful of really creative people making fleshed out games that look like this in the hopes of finding something unique and fun. If you produce an adventure game that looks bad but people really enjoy playing it, it is probably worthwhile to spend the money to upgrade its visuals to a level to make the game a blockbuster; at the same time if the game is a dud you only lost 6 months of work of 10 develolpers (roughly $500,000) which is a fraction of the cost of making a full game that is a dud.
