[BigglesB]

Hadn’t thought of it in this context before but in game development a “vertical slice” could potentially be thought of as akin to the “pilot plant” in that it’s about proving out the _processes_ for creating game content (and working out how long each piece of content should take to make) before committing to “scaling up” said content production to deliver the full game…

[seventhtiger]

Game development is intensely iterative. One way to think of games is software where its only value is its usability. It has has no process workflows or business goals that it ever sacrifices usability for because the user experience is the value proposition itself. It only sacrifices the user experience for other aspects of the user experience.

Failed and not fun games do happen, but in general game developers put far more weight to this sort of process. There are no other goals that you can claim were accomplished if the users think the game sucks. So you get these ruthless production cycles and there's an appetite to cut things that don't work.