What are people’s thoughts on “early access” videogames? That seems to be a growing trend and I’m not sure how I feel about the concept.
How frequently do they get to an actual release?
What percent of their original fan base still cares when it finally happens?
How many just sort of “wind down” where the game stays in a sort of unfinished states and updates come fewer and farther between?
Are they scams, luring people to part with their cash for the “idea” of what the game might become?
Or can they just be considered “proof of concepts” for ideas that, even if that game developer can’t finalize, maybe inspires some other developer to do it better?
Plenty of successful and popular games spent time as Early Access: PUBG, Ark, Dead By Daylight, Kerbal Space Program, Subnautica, etc.
A number of games became vaporware or abandoned during the Early Access phase: Stomping Lands, Earth Year 2066, DayZ, Under the Ocean, etc.
A few games spent seemingly forever in Early Access in a pretty sketchy state but ultimately became finished products: Wreckfest and Road Redemption spring immediately to mind. A few might change dramatically such as We Happy Few which went from a linear experience with a $30 price tag to an open world style game with a $60 price tag. On the plus side, I guess if you bought in when it was “cheap” then yay you (provided you like the finished product).
I’m not in love with the whole thing but I’ve bought enough EA games when they’re well reviewed and come recommended by friends. So I can’t pretend that I boycott them either. But I do try to display extra caution and want to know I’m getting at least a complete working gaming experience even if not the final one. It’s one thing to buy an open world survival game where they’re tweaking and adding recipes, resources and enemies and another thing to buy an open world survival game where they have no recipes yet and only two types of enemies.
One thing I wish Steam would enforce (but they never will because $$$) is that publishers shouldn’t be allowed to sell DLC for unfinished games. This came up during Ark where the developers were still shielding themselves against legitimate complaints regarding optimization and game balance with “Early Access!” but found time to create DLC for the game with a $20 price tag. That’s bullshit in my opinion.
The only completion stats I’ve seen were from 2014 where 20% of EA games had reached “completion” and left Early Access. I have no idea where it stands now but since Valve gets increasingly lax on what they accept onto Steam, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bunch more unfinished junk.
I rarely get Early Access games anymore, except from game makers that I’ve come to know and trust to make fine products. For example, I buy just about everything Klei Entertainment makes in early access because they simply make good games. It is too bad, because the idea of supporting small devs to make games is a good one, but I’ve been burned too many times. It isn’t necessary malicious either, just sometimes it is harder than the development time thinks it will be to make a game.
Beyond that though, one of the other reasons I don’t do a lot of early access is that I want to experience the full and complete game. I don’t want to burn out on a game while it is being built. So to continue with Klei, I bought Oxygen Not Included in early access. I’ve played it for about 1 hour. I’ll play the heck out of it when it comes out, but I don’t want to play it incomplete. So again, I will only buy early access if I know it is a game I’ll play by a developer in which I can have confidence will produce a quality product.
I’ll buy an Early Access game if I’m happy with it’s current price point and development. I won’t buy EA based on what it might turn out to be, but what it is now. That said, I only have two current EA games in my Steam list - Space Engineers (which is growing bit by bit, even to include a small “campaign”) and StarMade, which is specifically just for my family to screw around with.
Subnautica and KSP are my two big EA “wins”, and I can’t think of any that I’ve regretted spending the money on.
The best way to treat early access is to see if you enjoy what the game looks like now and buy based on that. There have been some big successes mentioned above (although the biggest EA success was the original - Minecraft), and you tend not to hear so much about the failures. I bought into a game called Legends of Ellaria a while ago, and while they are still building it and putting out updates, I no longer feel sure they will ever release the full game they promised all those years ago, so that’s not something I’m going to do again.
One game I will mention here is Star Citizen, which appears more and more to be a scam rather than an actual attempt to make a game anyone will ever play. See the game room thread for more details.
I bought Oxygen Not Included yesterday, and it’s ridiculously compelling. They released a major update yesterday, so that might be part of it.
The big piece missing right now, from my perspective, is hand-holding: the game doesn’t tell you stuff like how the weights of gases matter, or how to arrange pipes so they don’t block one another, or that sort of thing. I’m restarting over and over as I work myself into a corner. But there are wikis and guides to help.
I bought it Early Access because the company is a proven name with me; I’ve enjoyed other games by them, and I therefore trust they’re not gonna flake out on me. Subnautica I bought early access because even the early playthrough was so amazing (I played it on my brother’s account). In general I have to have a strong reason to buy something Early Access, though.
So many games turn out to be vaporware that I’ve pretty much stopped paying attention to most announcements of upcoming games. I consider early access to be one more potential ‘gotcha’ in the fine print and one more thing to be careful to avoid.
One game I have been looking forward to is Tropico 6 (my second favorite series after Might & Magic). Last year they announced it will be released in 2018 – but recently the press releases are talking about a ‘beta release’ in 2018 … makes me nervous … hope they don’t go the EA route. I really want to play the game but I don’t want to pay to be a beta tester and I don’t want to get frustrated with it or burned out on it before it is actually finished.
Space Engineers is a game I’ve been playing since the early days of its release. IMHO, it’s open-world sandbox Legos in space format lends itself well to the EA model. And it’s actually fairly impressive how the game has evolved over the past couple of years. But that said, it still has a lot of technical issues and there seems to be a fair amount of controversy in the community over the ultimate direction of the game.
Similarly, DayZ is a game I’ve played/followed since its early days as an ArmA II mod. The EA standalone version suffers from similar issues as Space Engineers, but also some different ones. While SE, you can probably play forever in its current state, constantly building new ships and stations and whatnot with all sorts of mods built by the gaming community. DayZ is pretty much static with its giant empty rural Post-Soviet Bumblefuckistan map. DayZ as a mod made a big splash with its unprecedented brutal sandbox style of survival gameplay. But people have been playing on some version of that same map for years now, waiting for a polished finished product. I know they have another major update in the works now, but I thinking that even if it were released tomorrow, I won’t really care.
And one of the main issues with both these EA games is that there are probably a dozen similar titles for each by now.
Some Early Access games are those where they have a perfectly playable game, but it needs polish and a better new user experience before they call it complete. Hopefully there’s a demo or something like it for a game you’re interested to see if you find it playable in its current state. This is basically true for the two that I’ve played, Factorio and Prismata. Each had a demo that made me absolutely hooked, but they had a weak new player experience for those not in the top tier of desire to figure things out for themselves. They’re getting better in that regard, but I’ve already played about as much of the games that I want, but I definitely feel like I got my money’s worth.
I decide to buy or not based on what the game is like right now. If, as it is right now, it’s a great game with only three of the planned eventual five game zones implemented, I’ll buy it and play three game zones. If the developer then does release the last two zones, bonus. On the other hand if as it is right now it’s really buggy and crashes all of the time and half the thing that are supposedly in the game still don’t work, I’m not going to buy it now in the hopes that the developer will eventually fix it. Let me know when you have actually fixed it, and I might buy it then.
One exception where extra caution is warranted is if the game can’t function without an online component. In that case, I want to be sure that the online part is going to remain available before I buy.
I don’t really see the point; If the game is good, it’ll come out and be BETTER when they’re done dealing with all the necessary fixes and feature updates for actual release. If the game isn’t good, why do I want it?
The only reasons I can imagine for getting an Early Access game are:
A) If it’s a competitive game that you somehow KNOW you want to be highly competitive at, so you need all the time you can get with it.
B) It’s a game that you REALLY, REAAAALLLY want to be able to attempt to influence the development of
C) You are concerned that if the game doesn’t get your early access dollars, that it’ll never come out “for real.”
None of those are going to be factors in 99% of my decision making.
D) The developer and/or publisher has a good track record so you know it’ll likely be out eventually, and likely at a higher price.
E) Innovation is a good thing. The developer and/or publisher are working on something interesting and/or different enough to warrant tossing a bit of money their way; you don’t really care if the game ends up abandoned.
Eh; Most of the time, if you can wait for a game to be out of early access, you can also wait for a sale which is likely to be substantially larger than whatever early access incentive bargain they are offering.
Honestly, I’ve never really noticed games being substantially discounted in early access, but I don’t track very rigorously either.
The “innovation” suggestion to me falls under my “case C” already – it’s an effort to try to make sure that this game has a good chance of coming out because you want to support the innovation/show that there’s a market. Though often THAT sort of thing is done via Kickstarter rather than Early Access these days.
Back in the dawn of EA, it was common for games to be priced cheaper. There was also, hilariously a game or two priced substantially higher for the supposed privilege of being part of the process of making the game a reality. But usually cheaper.
These days that’s rarely the case aside from extreme examples like We Happy Few getting a new publisher and the game direction radically changing. Besiege had a couple small price increases since it went into EA in 2015 ($7 to $8 to $10), however it has also gone on sale numerous times and it’s been bundled.
I don’t remember ever really being burned on an EA game but I generally only purchase those which already have reviews as being a fairly complete experience. I have burned out on a couple games before they hit full release: Rust, Ark and PUBG come to mind but I don’t feel bad about the time I spent in the more “wild west” early days of the game’s life and, in Ark’s case, am glad I played it early and before they made it significantly more complicated.
There’s also the possibility that the game will never officially leave Early Access, but that what you will get out of it will still be decent. The developer might just like officially calling it EA so they have an excuse to keep tinkering with it should the mood strike them (regardless of whether it actually will strike them).
Not really caring if the game is ever finished != “You are concerned that if the game doesn’t get your early access dollars, that it’ll never come out ‘for real.’”
