It's telling that, in his postmortem of Divinity: Original Sin, Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke spent just as much time, if not more, talking about the business of game development rather the development itself. He painted a sobering picture of the many hardships that await game developers, especially those working on the size and scope of Original Sin. In essence, development is an all-or-nothing game. You should never compromise and release an almost-finished, buggy game just to match some marketing person's release calendar, because in the end the only thing that will be remembered about your game is the quality of its content.
Larian Studios learned this the hard way with a previous title, Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, which Vincke admitted was a massive flop that put the future of Larian into jeopardy, due largely to the fact they released the game before it was ready. They vowed not to let this happen to Original Sin. This is a sweet sentiment, but in practice it ran the studio into massive debt and stretched almost every resource they had to the breaking point as they continued to iterate and polish their game.
