Does the MVP model work for games in general? It seems if you're submitting to Steam, the App Store, Android Market, etc. you'll either end up denied entry or get buried by the games with a certain level of polish.
I'm pretty sure MVP works for the kind of game that is most likely to become a viral hit. There is a considerably sharp line between these types of games(stuff like Farmville, Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, Fantastic Contraption, Civilization, Sims, Rollercoaster Tycoon) where the mechanics are an aid towards making the player perform some inherently fun creative and strategic acts, and big-spend blockbusters driven largely by their built-in content(Modern Warfare, Final Fantasy, Zelda, World of Warcraft), where nearly everything is hand-crafted and scripted to give players a controlled experience.
The latter type of game looks better for marketing purposes and can command a certain kind of audience that wants couch-potato entertainment - but the first kind is ultimately more efficient and profitable, because it can exploit the user's imagination to a far greater extent.
What evidence do you have that the first kind is ultimately more profitable? The second group of games you listed are some of the most successful games of all time... even Civ can't compare to WoW in profits.
I'm not sure World of Warcraft is a fair comparison, given that it is a massively multiplayer subscription game with social ties, where the economics are totally different.
But if someone has the numbers, I'd love to see how its profit stacks up against, say, the number one best-selling PC game -- The Sims (and number two: The Sims 2). On the one hand, WoW benefits from consumer psychology; it's like buying a new AAA title every three months, and it takes effort to cancel. On the other hand, WoW must have huge ongoing administrative, overhead, and content generation costs.
Generally and traditionally, no. You're probably right about the requirements for getting into the various digital distribution outlets, but it seems that gamers are willing to forgive a lot of problems and missing polish for the chance to play something while it's still in development.
For example, I think Minecraft is a great example of a MVP, although I admit it's an unusual case. The developer started on it in May 2009 and as far as I know it was available to play or buy within a few weeks of that. It's now making a lot of money, as I'm sure you're aware.
Valve's efforts with TF2 were a step in the MVP direction. It was in development for years and years before a massively marketed release upon completion - so in that sense nothing like MVP - but the fact that they then kept on developing it and new people kept on buying it showed that games don't necessarily have to be this big "release and forget" deal where a slow start dooms the product to complete failure.
Realtime Worlds recently collapsed after taking $100m in venture capital and then releasing APB to mediocre reviews and terrible sales. What if they had been selling alpha versions of the game all along? Perhaps they would have slowly picked up fans over a long period rather than relying on the huge marketing push to find a critical mass of fans in a narrow time window before the world moved onto the next big thing. Perhaps the earlier feedback could have alerted them to the game's problems and given them the chance to pivot. Perhaps they could have seen the game's failure coming and given up before wasting quite so much money.
Another example of MVPs in gaming are the guys at Wolfire. They are developing a game called Overgrowth and releasing weekly alphas to those who preorder, thereby funding the development as they go along.
They were also part of the huge Humble Indie Bundle, so it's fair to say they're doing pretty well on the marketing/money front.
