A Swedish programmer posted a Java applet to a forum this week. You open it in a browser, you get a landscape made of cubes, and you can dig them out and put them somewhere else. That is the entire thing. There is no publisher, no marketing, no release date, and as far as I can tell no plan.
The game is called Minecraft and I have lost more of an evening to it than I intend to admit.
Mechanically there is almost nothing there yet. No goal, no score, no threat worth the name. What it has instead is the specific pleasure of a space that responds to you, which is a thing games used to do more of before everything acquired an objective marker. You build something stupid, you stand back and look at it, and then you make it bigger. I cannot defend this on any of the axes a review normally uses.
What I actually want to talk about is how it arrived. This is one person shipping an unfinished thing directly to whoever wants it, in a browser, with no gatekeeper between the two. No certification process, no publisher deciding it lacks a hook, no retail window, no eighteen month development cycle with the concept locked at the start. He can change it tomorrow because somebody in a forum thread says something sensible.
The standard objection is that this produces a lot of unfinished rubbish, and the standard objection is right. Most of what gets released this way will be abandoned in six weeks. But the alternative we have been living with is a system where anything without a proven audience does not get made at all, and I am not convinced that filter has been selecting for quality so much as for familiarity.
The uncomfortable question is what happens if he wants to be paid. Selling something unfinished is a promise you might not keep, and the people who bought it early have no recourse if the developer gets bored. Nobody has established what the etiquette is, because until recently nobody could sell a game without a company standing behind it.
I have no idea whether this particular game becomes anything. I am fairly sure the arrangement around it does.