Early Access... Money before reviews can be done

I've seen this trend between games in "Early Access" and games calling themselves "Not Final" is a way to make money on games before any reviews can be done. Pre Order was sort of like this but no money made it back to developers (just retailer.) I'm worried that as long as they never call themselves final they can never be hurt by a review.

So if you're concerned... just wait until the game is actually done and reviews are out. Right?

That'll do.

There may not be reviews but you can find people talking about them. Or just wait for the reviews.

And then any criticism people level at the game is met with "well it's not finished" "they're planning to fix this and implement that".

My policy is don't pay people for not finishing a game.

Right, because these little indie teams that have probably given up a lot in their personal lives to make their dreams a reality are going into this thinking, "Man our game is going to suck and review terribly, we better find as many easy marks as we can and make our nut before we hit that <60 Metacritic! Who cares if we blow all our credibility for games we might have made in the future? We got into indie game development because we wanted to get rich quick!"

Except for, you know, all the reviews by people who have bought the game on the store page.

How is this any different than companies releasing public betas? The only difference is your money guarantees you that you'll have access to the final game. Its for people who don't mind playing a broken game so they can get an early look at it while also helping fund and potentially even shape the direction of the game.

If a developer wants to avoid review scores, they will find a way to do it. There are a handful of fully released, critically-panned games that have re-released their game to get a new Metacritic score. e.g. The following Steam games: Ravaged transformed into Ravaged Zombie Apocalypse, WarZ transformed into Infestation: Survivor Stories, and Orion: Dino Beatdown transformed into Orion: Dino Horde. There are a few more that I can't remember, but you get the idea.

Avoiding reviews during Early Access only hurts their publicity and visibility, which can be a problem down the road because of how they're selling the game. There are a few Early Access games on Steam - some still far cry away from being feature-complete - that are already hitting 75% off sales and selling for a few dollars. I'm very interested in how long those studios last, and what state the their games will be in when they are finished development - either through completion of development or a lack of funds. Some developers (e.g. the Planetary Annihilation devs) charge ridiculous amounts to ensure that it is a proper development period for the game. This leaves them an audience as they hit alpha, beta, and release, lowering their price along the way and avoiding the problem I foresee.

As smart as the Planetary Annihilation pricing model is, I think the opposite approach - higher discounts for earlier purchases - is the more consumer-friendly route. I purchased Mount&Blade (from Turkish indie dev TaleWorlds) during its development, before it procured Paradox as publisher. There was a discount on the game because it had not yet released. If I had purchased it earlier in development, it would have cost less in relation to how much riskier it was as a finished product. As a video game developer, TaleWorlds had their priorities straight: they were firstly selling a game to consumers, and secondly receiving additional funds to develop their game; their pricing model reflects this. Planetary Annihilation is treating it more like a Kickstarter, with opposite priorities, when that is clearly not the case.

Basically, Early Access games should not be featured during sales. They should earn that right when they have finished their game. At the same time, they need to keep in mind they are selling a risky product and should price it as such. It's not a privilege nor an honour for customers to purchase Early Access, it is a gamble.

Don't buy early access games.

I think its a bad trend but that's just me. I did buy into Starbound and one other early access game but honestly I won't really touch them again until after they are "officially" released.

There will be impressions posted. And don't buy an early access game unless you feel very strongly toward it (to the point of being okay with it barely working).

As an aside from that, reviews are usually less useful than the random trailer a developer releases in guessing the appeal of a game from a personal prospective anyway (in my experience, YMMV, etc).

I've written about this long before Giantbomb mentioned that they were bothered by the abuse of early access, but I am not a fan of early access. I do feel it is causing steam to become cluttered with garbage ware.

That's just my opinion, though.

If it's up for sale then it's up for review. If it's shit and unfinished then people should know. If they think that's unfair then they reconsider asking people for real money in exchange for promises and an unfinished mess.

I just want a way to filter unfinished games. I don't want to see pre-order or early-access games, ever. Mixing them in with real, finished products is a bad joke.

I bought quite a few games in early Aces because I love the idea of giving input but also supporting developer making games I wish were made more of. for example Blackguards is a great Turnbased RPG with a Final Fantasy in the west feeling and also I recently bought Might and Magic X Legacy for me and my friend (for Christmas) which looks really really interesting,

However when I buy such a game I really inform myself about it first. Watching youTube videos for example is a great help to see what the game is looking right now and what they will promise for the future. Also I love to buy these games because of the mostly reduced price as well. That said I do not buy these games with no full release in the near future like many early access games also are.

With some of the Kickstarter scam stuff coming out of the woodwork these days? I'm worried some of those "little indie teams" might be thinking exactly along those lines, sans sarcasm.

we have minecraft to blame for this.

Vote with your money.

I honestly can't think of any games that had a successful Kickstarter that were created just to dupe people out of money. There was that one where the head dev moved to Portland and the game never got finished, but Kickstarter is still working with those people to get the backers some kind of restitution. And that sketchy shit with that Ouya game where the devs friends backed it so they could get the bonus funding from Ouya, but that was really unrelated to Kickstarter itself. And they did plan on still making a game.

Unless I'm missing something, I think your general point is (so far at least) baseless.

People need to understand what Early Access really is, most people seem to just think its a way to get a game earlier and then complain when something isn't a certain way. I do not think games not being reviewed is a problem at all, reviews alone are becoming less and less important to games as a whole. Besides, any early access game you can think of has a video on youtube about it. People will understand it with time and most people should probably just wait for games to be done before buying them.

I never relied on reviews for buying advice.

I don't really have an issue with the basic concept of "Early Access", but I do feel that Steam and the participating developers do need to do a better job of segregating those games in some way from full retail releases as well as fully communicating the details of what the "Early Access" program really is because threads like this make it pretty evident that there is a breakdown in that communication.

I will say though that I do think that some developers do themselves a bit of a disservice by entering "Early Access" a bit too early. Some games also don't tend to lend themselves to that release format all that well.

I think the worst thing about it for me is that I have no idea when a game is actually done. There are tons of early access games that I was interested in, but I only want to play them when they're complete, so when they're actually released (whatever that means) I might miss it because I'll assume it's still being worked on.

As far as I know, many games sell the best on the day they're released, so early access could really fuck that up for these devs.

@joshwent: Yeah. I don't know what the stats look like, but I have to imagine that for every game that does extremely well in Early Access there must be a dozen that shoot themselves in the foot with a poor Early Access release and destroys a ton of potential that a full final product might have had.

Steam has a good idea here, but it needs some refinement. Developers also need to take more care in weighing the potential pros/cons of putting an unfinished game on display.

@joshwent:

I'm not necessarily saying that people don't want to deliver a game or ship a product, I'm just saying that folks should be wary of becoming completely trusting of every indie developer out there just because they're indie. I agree that most indie developers are passionate individuals who really do want to see their dream game come to life and have people enjoy it, but because our world sucks, there will always be people trying to take advantage of this newfound hope and optimism behind indie game development. It's soul crushing to think about it that way, but just as there are people out there in the triple AAA game market looking to make a quick buck, so too are there in the indie market. Only time will tell when these sorts of people will rear their ugly heads and through what venue. Will it be Kickstarter? Early Access? Who can say? Either way, I'm not looking forward to it.

Also:

Eurogamer has started doing Early access reviews and I bet we'll start seeing more of those assuming the trend continues.

Just a bit afraid myself that at some point all games will be early access games. That way one doesnt even have to finish a game in order to sell it.

Its just a question of time when we get the first cases of early access games which wont be finished. This will be even more problematic with steams "no refund" policy.

Hasn't Steam made exceptions for particularly egregious cases in the past? Like that crappy zombie game and that Ashes game.

Are you saying people who go to this website typically decide on whether or not to spend money on a game based on review scores? I'm under the impression that most rely more on quick looks to see if the game's something they'd like, or a mention on the bombcast.

Or simply, deciding if you want to get a game yourself. Over time you get a general sense of what will probably be good and what will probably be shit. Not enough to go into reviewing games, but combine this with thriftiness and you'll probably avoid spending much money on shitty games during early access.

Early Access, kickstarters, all that jazz is not something I like to get into too much, but it does enable indie devs to make something without having to have a day job. And if people are interested why not give their money to the thing they wanna see made.

Now, hopefully in the future this model changes into something more like an investment - you put your money in and see a return, that is more than just the game and maybe a t-shirt.

However I would never ever even consider that anyone would support a major publisher, someone with actual capital money for a project, in an early access game. Then again we have exclusive betas for preorders, so fuck me, right?

I only pay for Early Access if the game as it stands looks interesting, or they come up with some bonus I'll get for giving them the money early, like a discount. I will give money to Rust when it looks like something I want to try out, not before. I wanted to try Prison Architect as soon as I heard about it, I was willing to forgo the safety of waiting.

Kind of the same thing with Kickstarter, but I treat Kickstarter like more of a risk. I understand Read Only Memories or Pillars of Eternity could come out and be terrible, but I read their pitch, I did the research, and I'm comfortable gambling money on it. It would be something I would buy on Steam merely in order to try it out for myself.

I think there's tons of risk in the Early Access model, especially if a developer tries to release a totally unfinished broken product and wonders why their sales drop off when the game is actually released. It'll be a shot to the gut when the bad word of mouth starts to plague those EA games, and hopefully that actually happens to the games that are trying to goose money out of dumb people and loose wallets.

On the other hand, being able to support a developer in the middle of development, when resource management is a thing they'll actually have first-hand experience of, is really cool. I know for a fact that the EA proceeds for Underrail helped the developer find a reasonable office space, equipment, and employees to help them work on that game until completion.