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[Foxite]

I've wondered, some games release unstable versions of the game from time to time. This allows you to play the most recent features of the game, no matter how broken they might be. One example of a game to do this is Starbound, which seems to work pretty well. Although some unstable releases may simply crash on load under all circumstances (since they do it every night, unconditionally), usually they have buggy and/or unfinished but working previews of what's being made.

Has Toady ever considered to do this?

[mifki]

[NullForceOmega]

You want the unstable version?  It's right up there on the downloads page.  Toady doesn't release 'stable' and 'unstable' because he basically just hands us the current functioning build, the rest of the time it isn't in a functional state, it's just code.

[Admiral Obvious]

I've wondered, some games release unstable versions of the game from time to time. This allows you to play the most recent features of the game, no matter how broken they might be. One example of a game to do this is Starbound, which seems to work pretty well. Although some unstable releases may simply crash on load under all circumstances (since they do it every night, unconditionally), usually they have buggy and/or unfinished but working previews of what's being made.

Has Toady ever considered to do this?

You want the unstable version?  It's right up there on the downloads page.  Toady doesn't release 'stable' and 'unstable' because he basically just hands us the current functioning build, the rest of the time it isn't in a functional state, it's just code.

Pretty much this. As nice as it would be, it's just infeasible to happen with only one person handling development.

Chucklefish has an entire office of people and a mostly stable product (not even counting that they are a full fledged publishing company at this point), which means they can push out daily updates... daily.

[Telgin]

This has come up a few times before, and Toady has been against it from what I recall.  If nothing else, he's stated in the past that releasing a new version takes hours, probably from compilation to testing on various platforms.  Some of that could be automated, probably, but I imagine it's still a huge hassle.

The real problem though, is that in between really long releases Toady is usually gutting things that leave the game pretty much unplayable.  For shorter release cycles, like we're in right now, I guess it's not worth the time and hassle to release small periodic builds.

[Diamond]

Yes, because we have grown too tired of constant releases of stable versions.