To support my point, I browse devmaster open source game engine list for quite a while, and that is my general experience when I download and test game engines.

Quote: Original post by PlayfulPuppyMajor revisions for marketing reasons should probably just be limited to the product name; SuperAwesomePhotoeditor 5 and the like.

SuperAwesomePhotoeditor 5 is vaporware! They aren't even finished with SuperAwesomePhotoeditor 3 yet.

Quote: Original post by PlayfulPuppy
The numbers are equally cryptic to users anyway. 1.3.476 gives the consumer just as much information as r7489, which is pretty much nothing other that 'this version is more recent that the other one'.

You should believe that, but my experience is (sadly) that at least a significant enough amount of consumers seems to either be lacking a brain or just wants to be deliberately obnoxious. It is probably not the majority of consumers who is like that, but the proportion is big enough to create some very disturbing "noise" (which may or may not have an effect for your project -- nobody will be able to tell).

If you fail to deliver a new x.y release for half a year, you'll get questions in your forums when there'll finally be the next release. If you direct them to the perfectly stable and usable r7489 build, you'll get something like "ZOMG! Alpha software that crashes my computer!!!" as reply. If you fail to deliver an x.y release for a year or longer, you'll first see "is this project dead????!?" in your forums, soon to be followed by "tis project is dead for years!!11!" in your forums and on someone's blog.

If you are foolish enough to reply to the "when will the next release be out" questions with something even remotely similar to a date (let's say you replied "by end of this year"), you may already end up being titled "behind schedule" a week or two later, even if it's mid-summer, and nobody could possibly know "the schedule". Oh, and of course you'll read similarly negative things everybody's and their grandmother's blog by beginning of November.

People will happily use a 1.2 build which is identical on the binary level to the r7489 build (except for the version number), but will reject to use the latter. Your mileage may vary of course, but those are things I've seen.