Double Fine released its free-to-play game Middle Manager of Justice on the iOS App Store accidentally. Project lead Kee Chi claims responsibility for releasing the unfinished and buggy version of the game to the public before it was ready.

“Yeah, it was totally my fault,” he said. “With the way you submit things on the App Store, you have to specify what the release date is, and a while back we had set the date to September, but at the time we didn’t know if that would be final or not. Once we submitted the game, we realized we had a lot of things we still needed to tweak and fix, but at the same time, we didn’t want to remove it from the [submission] process in case Apple catches other things we need to take care of, and we didn’t want to do a double submission.”

While this was happening, the “tentative” September launch date was in effect for the game. “So I was on the train heading to work this week, and I get a call from our tech director saying, ‘Hey, um, so it looks the game is live in every territory.’ And I just went, ‘What! ‘” said Chi.

“It wasn’t what I wanted the world to see quite yet,” he said. “At Double Fine, we pride ourselves on putting a solid product out there, so having something out there that was buggy and not quite ready yet was really frustrating.”

Since many players had already downloaded the game, Double Fine reached out to players to get their feedback for what was going to be the full official release. “I guess it kind of just turned into a beta test,” Chi said. “I mean, if people find bugs that we haven’t found internally, I’d love to know about them so I can fix them.”

Chi indicates that Double Fine has received plenty of feedback to both eliminate bugs and make the game’s free-to-play elements less restrictive for non-paying players. “If anything, I welcome these suggestions from people, because we’re still learning and we plan to work on this well after it goes live to make the game deeper, and luckily this means we’ll get an early start on that process,” he said.

Source: Gamasutra