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I am wondering if any game designers have used an online implementation of a game to balance and tweak it before commercial release.

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Apparently some Dominion cards have been play tested online: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_(card_game)#Online_Play – tttppp Feb 1 at 11:45
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As a software developer, creating an online implementation is many orders of magnitude more difficult than getting a group of people to playtest a physical game. So you'd only do this if you wanted to release the online version simultaneously, which seems like putting the cart before the horse. – bwarner Feb 1 at 14:56
Any designs, or any commercial designs? Are you only interested in rules design changes, or perhaps instruction rewrites, layout changes, etc. for clarity? – user1873 Feb 1 at 14:57
@bwarner you could imagine a kind of "game design funnel", where most games are rejected at a print and play stage. Some promising candidates get turned into an online version for tweaking and balance. The goal isn't just to minimize costs, you also want to produce something of quality. – rrenaud Feb 1 at 16:10
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@rrenaud Imagine a very optimistic budget to create an online implementation of $20,000. Then imagine how many playtest sessions of the physical game that you could get for half that amount. – bwarner Feb 1 at 16:55
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I'm pretty sure "Day and Night" was tested online before release. But the online game was only limited to a small beta testing audience. The website used to say that the online version would reappear at some point, but the website is now dead and the developers appear to have vanished.

Since Day and Night is an asymmetric game, getting the two sides balanced is important, and the developers claimed that they were very close to 50:50 based on online testing.

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