There’s usually a big, brightly colored notice that you see when viewing a game that’s still in a particularly early stage of development.
On the other hand, developers vary wildly in how much full disclosure they give about the state of the game. Sometimes it’s just, “Hey, the game is already really great! Come help us develop it!”
Other games, like Prison Architect, whose preview video talk dramatically about the game-breaking bugs you’re absolutely going to deal with when you play the game, are more forward about it.
Yeah, I think people hear of good experiences with fairly finished games (say, Kerbal Space Program) and don’t realize how uneven the experience can be. Perhaps Steam should be a little more stringent on how far along development needs to be before selling it. Anyway, I’ve never bought an Alpha game so I’ve never been burned and have no dog in the fight except that I see the complaint come up often enough on various forums.
So far, my win of the season was buying Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, an entertaining corridor style shooter set in the Old West with attractive cel shaded graphics, excellent voice acting, an entertaining story and fun gun play. It’s not perfect – I’m not a fan of the duel mechanic and people who hate how “consoles ruined games” will grind their teeth at the two-weapon limit but the good far outweighs the bad and I’m glad I dropped the five or six bucks on it.
The dog of the season was Remember Me, a dreary 3rd person action game marred by a plodding pace, clunky combat and terrible boss fights. The memory-changing mechanics aren’t particularly fun and it’s amazing how a game with this much hand-holding can still take so long to accomplish anything. The best I can say for it is that the graphics aren’t bad and, if you set it to French language with English subtitles, you can pretend you’re in some foreign futurist art film. That novelty only takes you so far, though.
There’s too much to quote in the posts above, but they seem to be mostly responses to my last post, but I want y’all to know that I know what it means to pay for a game that is still in development. I have no problem doing that; I like to support people and projects that I think are worthwhile.
The problem I have with Godus isn’t that the game is unfinished; my problem is that it does not fit my definition of a game. There is no decision-making. I am not deciding that a town should be built HERE and a quarry should be built THERE and my followers should all play Jenga every Friday night while they sing praises to me. All that you do in the game is watch the screen and then click on a specific thing. Which then causes the thing to do something, but you can’t choose what they do. Godus waits patiently for you to click something when you need to in order to let the software move on to the next step or process or whatever, but to me this isn’t a game it’s more like a movie that won’t play the next scene until I click a certain icon on the screen. IMO not fun and not a game. Games involve doing things and making decisions and using knowledge or skill. Godus does not require any of those things.
I agree with Jophiel, tho, that Steam should make a section for alpha games that is distinct from finished products; it would be nice to be able to just browse the alpha section for investment opportunities.
I’d prefer a simple filter so I could look at features excluding Early Access. They often cost more than complete titles, so it’s like paying extra for an incomplete game. I must have seen dozens of complaints about game companies releasing buggy titles and treating customers as beta testers over the years, so it’s surprising that cranky ass gamers are so accepting of Steam cluttering up its sale with alpha versions. When did Steam become a charity?
At first, Goddus looked like it might be a pretty good game. Checking it out is trickier than normal, because there’s hardly any reviews-- no score on Metacritic. Finding one that looks like it wasn’t written by a maniac, the reviewer concurs with Bo: Goddus sucks, at least right now.
Which is another problem with this Early Access idea. A fairly common problem with Metacritic is that reviews are colored by the early days of the release. If there are critical bugs in the first release, they skew the overall score due to issues that will be resolved by the time I consider buying the game. This is especially true of user ratings. Nothing pisses off a gamer more than not being able to play a new game. So, if reviewers and players get into the habit of writing about Early Access games, that problem is going to be magnified, possibly to the point of harming sales of these titles, if they ever actually get finished.
If I had a Mac, I’d get the demo to make sure that I could play the game before I bought it. I do it anyway if Win 7 isn’t the recommended OS.
This is a shame. I got a copy free with my video card, and didn’t expect much from it. It turned out to have an enjoyable stealth mechanic, though you could just play it Rambo style if you wanted. The atmosphere was kind of what you’d expect from anything described as ‘Russian Post-apocalyptic’. Eventually, I got ahold of the prequel for a few bucks, but I’ve been busy playing other games. And my, you know, actual work. I hope you find a work-around or something.
They are being the opposite of a charity in this case since they get 30% of the sales of all those Early Access games. If they would not allow them, some other site would be happy to get that share instead. Starbound for example has sold over a million copies and is constantly in the top 10 of Steam sales charts. Some of those have been sold at other sites like the Humble store but even if half of them are sold on Steam that’s 30% x 15 USD x 500k = 2.25M dollars. And that’s just one game - DayZ standalone version and Rust both have been hanging around the top 10 of Steam sales as well, both Early Access titles.
Having enough cash to actually finish them is one of the major reasons for indie titles to go Early Access, as far as I’ve read about the gaming industry. A lot of promising projects are indefinitely delayed when the creators have to get a real job to pay the bills. Getting a lot of bad reviews if you release an incomplete buggy mess is true though and those reviews are just going to be there forever. Not sure if there’s a good resolution for that for the devs - as a customer it just means doing some research before buying a game is even more important.
The thing is, there’s only so much research you can do about a product that isn’t actually available yet. And someone has to be the first guy to check it out, so for some small number of people there just won’t be any amount of research that will help them beyond reading what the devs wrote.
So let the early adopters do that. Alpha testing, especially when you pay to do it, is not for the risk-averse. I should think the lack of the big ol’ Metacritic link in the game description should scare off the unwary.
I am one of the early adopters. I like taking risks (one of my life mottos is “Don’t take chances, take risks”; I’ve posted that here on the SDMB before).
I have no problem with the risk-taking, I have a problem with shitty games. And I have a problem with being sold something that doesn’t work as advertised (or work at all, as is the case with M:LL).