I'm not sure if the 0.9 -> 0.10 is standard among game devs but that type of numerical filing throws me off (would prefer it to be 0.09 -> 0.10). Nitpick aside, very much looking forward to 0.9, hopefully in late Dec/early Jan. Looking further outward, even if 0.10 is considered a shorter update (6-8 months out), we're probably looking at a few more years before the game is finished.
It is not really standard but everyone uses it because it is what makes the most sense.
Version numbers aren’t decimal values, so
0.9 doesn’t “become” 1.0 in the sense of 0.9 → 0.10 being “weird math.” Each part of the version is just a separate counter.
A common structure looks like this:
A . B . C . D
- A = Major release number
(big milestones, full releases, DLC lines, etc.)
- B = Major update
(significant systems, new features, large content drops)
- C = Minor update
(smaller additions, improvements, secondary content)
- D = Patch / hotfix
(bug fixes, balance tweaks, small adjustments)
— sometimes written as a, b, c… instead of numbers.
So
0.9 → 0.10 isn’t “0.9 jumping to one-tenth”—it’s just
major update 10 following major update 9. They’re separate counters, not decimals.
Because of that, hitting
0.10 doesn’t mean the next step is 1.0 or that the game is almost finished. The devs can have as many major updates as they need before reaching the full “1.0” release milestone.