I always find this strange

[Alex95]

With the reveal of Fire Emblem related bits in Miitomo, I remembered a topic I've been meaning to make for some time. Why do developers include bits from a future project in updates? It honestly makes no sense to me. You could say they're "preparing" for said project, but I think it makes more sense to just do it all in one go. By that I mean, data miners are everywhere; something's going to be found out. Why do developers put stuff like that in? Is it an Easter Egg? Are they putting those in purely for data miners to help with the hype? Is Nintendo just trolling us?

[MCProductions]

As a small time developer, I can say that shit winds up in places like that by complete accident. Chances are, they started work on the FE content before the new Miitomo update was made, but when they suddenly had to release the update, they didn't have time to remove the FE data from the update file, so they choose to hide it instead, since that was faster.

[kingddd]

As a software and web developer, we're either

1.) pure lazy and don't want to bother removing

2.) we forgot about the said items so it's just left there

3.) we're too busy with whatever main tasks that removing said item isn't a priority for us to bother removing

4.) sometimes we put stuff there for testing and just leave it there

Especially when we're dealing with codes that span thousands and thousands of lines and with so many files to fool around in its filestructure, just one file that doesn't do anything is not something most developers should be worried about. Majority of the time we're more worried about bugs, technical issues and hoping something doesn't randomly break in the compiling process over 1 tiny file.

Hell one project I work with has so many deprecated and unused images, files in the structure that has been sitting there for 20 years and we're honestly too scared to remove. Not to mention it's not a priority for us at the point of developing new functions and features.

[Alex95]

Yeah, I get that developers leave stuff behind sometimes when things get cut or rushed. I did that my game, some things that weren't used are still in the coding or database.

As a small time developer, I can say that shit winds up in places like that by complete accident. Chances are, they started work on the FE content before the new Miitomo update was made, but when they suddenly had to release the update, they didn't have time to remove the FE data from the update file, so they choose to hide it instead, since that was faster.

This makes sense. Hiding content from view before it's completely ready, but it was still being developed. Guess the update wasn't as well planned ahead...