At what point during a games development do they consider the game "finished" and begin marketing it for release?

Depends on the company and how they plan their projects.

A "normal" approach is the plan out about 3 phases: Bare minimum required to ship, the "complete" game, and all of the extra bells whistles and cool features.

Any given development task and/or piece of the game is going to get sorted into one of those 3 categories.

Since release dates are ballparked quite awhile in advanced, they usually do their best to try and announce a time when they think they will have that "complete" game second phase done along with a few extra months of safety net.

However, because software is a fickle beast, you are almost always going to exceed your time budget and end up in a mad scramble to achieve that "complete game" milestone or end up releasing a product that's somewhere between the bare minimum and your "complete game" vision.

Now that's not necessarily the case here, they may not be ready to release gameplay yet because they don't want to disappoint people or give the wrong impression of the game. There are a variety of things that aren't really important to internal game design but are really important to a potential buyer's first impression. One example that comes to mind is fancy animations/high-res models for everything.

/r/NoStupidQuestions Thread