Anyway, of course you can cut corners in every industry, but it's easier to do so in games. Because the end user does not know what the game suppose to contain until he plays it to completion.
If Apple is making a new phone, every little feature of the phone is inspected by the consumer before it's bought. Some features are also vital for a phone or vital to upgrade from previous phones. You can't sell an iPhone 2 inside an iPhone 5 box(although some people bought bricks inside Apple boxes).
With a game, you can cut as many corners as you like, your 50 levels game can be shortened to 10 levels game. The user will not complain because he didn't know the game was originally meant to have 50 levels.
Things like splitting games into episodes are common in the game industry and with indies as well.
A game is one of the few products that the user don't know what he is buying until he plays it.
Of course there are reviews and etc, but you usually can't really tell what is that you are buying until you actually start playing it.
Well, you wouldn't actually know how the first iPhone suppose to have. You wouldn't know how many feature they cut out, how many hardware they change. The same thing goes with game. You can't sell iPhone 5 with the first iPhone inside the case, and you can't sell Final Fantasy 12 with Final Fantasy 1 inside the case(
except you're EA Sport)
Feature cut exists in every corner in creative industry, and none of them is neither easy nor hard. And like game, every corner cutting in the industry will go unnoticed if you don't have any benchmark for them to measure. We won't know the missing feature of Meat Boy, but we will notice the missing feature of Super Meat Boy, as Meat Boy are the benchmark for us to gauge it. Same goes to phone, OS, film, or even book.
For example, Walking Dead is getting boring and boring in the latest episode and people notice that, because they have season 1 as a benchmark to measure that. But if you shuffle up the season and start watching from season 3 to 1, you won't think season 3 is bad. As for the feature cut, they cut out the thing about "walker is dangerous" and "human VS walker". I'm not so familiar with film industry, but i know they cut stuff as much as game and goes unnoticed.
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