Correct, I clarified in the post you were quoting.
This is interesting. Could you expand on why you feel this way?
Well, there are a number of reasons I feel it’s been harmful to videogaming, but the most straightforward is that it has replaced or offset traditional beta testing. Instead of being something developers have to spend resources to do to ensure a quality product, now beta testing is perceived as something players can pay for the privilege of doing on the developer’s behalf.
Furthermore, early access is often used for marketing (get the word out about your game!) and business development (get an income stream going while you develop!). This has been helpful to some quality games – arguably, Mohawk’s Offworld Trading Company and Old World wouldn’t be the games they are without early access – but on the whole, I’d argue it’s allowed more trash to come to market than quality. Lowering the barrier to entry isn’t always a net positive.
-Tom
This is where I used to be, but I don’t even really feel that twinge anymore. I just regard it the same way I would regard a press release, a preview, or an advertisement for a game that isn’t out yet.
The only time it annoys me is when I don’t know a game is early access when I start playing it. That’s happened to me a few times with review builds, where I’ve been given a review build, only to be told later that it’s a review build for an early access release. Because apparently that’s a thing now. I think I even played something on Steam without realizing it was early access, but I only have my own cluelessness to blame for that one.
-Tom
In terms of “quality” of the final game, I think there’s no question that early access will produce a better game, all things being equal. It just has to do with how many eyes and hours are on it from a QA perspective. Most mediumish projects have anywhere from 40-100 people doing QA, if you do the math as to how many hours of QA that is per week, and then compare it with the number of hours you have on something that sells thousands of copies of early access, it’s not even close. It also exposes the game to just about every possible combo of system configuration you can run into, which is one of the more difficult things to replicate in a closed QA.
All that being said, it’s still a /boggle to me, that game devs and publishers, conned the buying public into not only doing QA on their products, but paying for it as well. P.T. Barnum is surely laughing. Whatever quibbles people have about it, it’s a genius move for game devs and publishers.
I have an idea that Early access, which I personally enjoy in some cases, actually have a detrimental effect on the course of a game development.
Every time you release an early access build to the public, you have to ensure that it
- Functions without crashing
- The UI work is usable
- The content makes sense
- The options in the game have weight and use
This requires extra work to make the current version polished, something that both takes time away that could be spent elsewhere, but also is time spent on things that often gets changed anyway.
Thats not to mention having features work in a way that almost certainly will change down the road, leading to dissatisfaction amongst the Early Access users, as change is never easy to adapt to, especially for some peopl (And I include me in this).
So - I do enjoy it since I get to play games earlier, but I wonder if its not really detrimental after all. I mean, if all stopped having early access, we’d just shift the release of games by a year or so into the future, leading us with just as many games after a short period of waiting.
The upside of early access is of course allowing funding of development, sometimes (For instance in the case of Valhaim), leading to vastly increased funding and development resources due to high popularity.
That can be a problematic issue as well, though.
Its a complex subject!
I feel like additional lower expectation releases would be beneficial to the dev team. Unlike almost any other type of software game developers can go years between releases, and may be ignorant to gaps in their QA coverage, which features are brittle, etc.
Anyway, as a player I don’t like early access. Every EA game I’ve played and enjoyed, in retrospect, I would rather have waited until it was complete.
If you’re running a studio, though, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t use early access for anything less than an absurdly funded AAA title. You get to validate your concept against the market much earlier in your development process than you would otherwise, and then adjust your budget or abandon the game if it’s a lemon.
Pretty hard to tease out EA’s impact on the industry, considering all the variables. Every industry changes as time goes along (it would be the rarest case where this was all for the good), and it’s tough to figure what EA has wrought as opposed to other factors.
I’m generally hostile to businesses’’ efforts to externalize their costs, but my objections increase exponentially with the size and power of the business involved. So when I look at little indies going EA, I just am not feeling this particular objection, maybe somewhat more when we are talking about a Baldur’s Gate. But we’re still not talking the heinous externalizing that dominant industries get away with.
In the end, though, I find that playing unfinished games too often ruins them for me. I play for a while, lose all feeling for the game, and find it tough to go back even if others are saying it’s great now. Especially with RPGs, but fairly often with strategy games too. But this is a personal risk, and so I see it as up to me whether to take an informed risk. After all, it’s clearly labeled Early Access. I mean, I know that a big bowl of super spicy food is a risk for me, but it’s up to me to avoid the risk, not up to the restaurant to quit offering it to those who want it.
In my mind, that label makes the difference. Truly, I feel a lot more anger towards companies that claim their game is a full release, but take months, even years, sometimes even paid DLC, to make the game any good. (Realizing I am not even consistent about that, considering my love of Master of Magic, the poster child for full release games that were far from ready.)
You could end up with ad reviews and bad word of mouth if your initial early access version is a mess. And you don’t get the sweet cash flow unless players play for long enough to be unable to get a refund.
I am firmly in the don’t buy/don’t play EA camp. 100%. YOLO.
My first and last Early Access game was Mount and Blade, several years before Early Access was even a thing, let alone cool. 2004. But in this instant the game was novel and good, and there were already several mods, but I ended up never really getting far in the actual final release version. /shrug
I am also firmly in the don’t buy/don’t play EA camp. I don’t mind that it exists for those who want that choice and don’t have enough info to form a firm opinion as to whether it’s bad for the industry as a whole.
However, I do feel like we do a poor job on this board of differentiating. I feel like any discussion of a game that is in Early Access needs to be clear about that. For example, any game-specific thread for a game that is in Early Access should have “Early Access” in the thread title (which can be removed if/when the game releases fully.) We do that here sometimes but it’s quite inconsistent. Even more troublesome to me is that we do a very poor job of differentiating this in the multi-game threads. People sometimes post Steam links which do display “Early Access” but often the discussion will be without links. I cannot tell the number of times I’ve seen someone talking about a game that sounded GREAT only to later discover it’s Early Access. I feel like Early Access needs to be mentioned for ALL Early Access games any time one comes up. For example, I like to use a convention in multi-game threads where I put the game I’m discussing in bold - IMO “Early Access” needs to be bolded in there as well.
I’m perfectly fine with pro Early Access folks enjoying it but IMO it does need to be clearly distinguished from actually released games. Yes, I’m aware that released games are often not “finished” and I don’t care. Just tell us if you are discussing an Early Access game. If you don’t, IMO you are not giving good info to the folks reading your posts.
(Also can we please be better at stating what games we are discussing in multi-game threads? I get whiplash scrolling up and down with you reply-but-not-quote yahoos.)
I sometimes wish the little scroll widget in Discourse had some kind of intelligence about its subject matter, and showed significant dates in its timeline. The possibliities are endless.
These could be problems with a standard non-EA release, too.
I think Forever Early Access games like Project Zomboid are incredibly daft.
Either have the balls to just release a 1.0 and keep giving it post release content support (see Terraria) or I’ll never ever freakin’ buy your stupid dumbass FEA game.
I agree with this fully, it drives me crazy to see great games like Caves of Qud or Cogmind just haunt Early Access indefinitely. Shit or get off the pot.
Naturally, but if you do a full release with that level of problems you deserve everything you get.
This is an interesting point to me. I mean some things are easy, ie reproducible bugs, UI issues, missing features, etc.
But in the EA I’m in (Warno) a big part of the new builds is about game balance. The problem is the audience/customers is basically divided between RTS gamers and people who want to follow a more realism route to solving balance issues. Its like US politics where both sides are not listening to each other. Not sure how the developer deals with this, other than maybe having good marketing information on what path would help sales the most.
If they’re smart, they’re up-front with the community on their balancing/design philosophy. I am a firm believer in games needing a strong creative vision to guide and shape the process, otherwise you end up with Ubisofty focus-grouped pap. Feedback is absolutely vital raw data, but it needs to be interpreted through a consistent lens. And in games, where the long-term development of a dedicated community can be a huge boon, communicating your intentions and the major features of that lens is IMO a huge deal.
Users ask for dumb, wrong shit all the time, heh. This is arguably more true in games than it is in business software, where it’s endemic.
I ignore Early Access games as a rule. Life’s too short for betas.
Playing preview builds for a decade cured me of any need to play Early Access or beta or PTR or whatever pre-release nonsense shops put out there, heh.
Not to mention afterwards you need to engage with the community feedback on the release.
After much reflection on this topic I came to the conclusion that many games do early access too early. Most games simply don’t work to be developed like the early early access successes of Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, and Rimworld. This is a combination of the type of game as well as the developer, and you’re right that development can effectively slow way down due to needing to do all the release prep over and over again.
I do think a lot of games, indies especially, can benefit immensely from a later early access period that gets the game in front of a wider audience prior to calling things “complete”. The approach that games like Songs of Conquest and Iron Oath are taking seem to me to be good examples of this. It does suck for people who were expecting a full release to find out it’s just EA, but that’s a messaging problem more than anything.
Conveniently, the above late early access release is exactly what I intend to do with my solo-dev game. It’ll be an essentially feature-complete game that will need a period of wider feedback to help make it as good as can be for the 1.0 release.
Exactly this, but of course that’s easier said than done. The most vocal members of the community will be the ones who are upset about some core design choice and will bring it up over and over. The Victoria 3 forums are a fun example of this. You can always expect to see a new thread demanding that they change war to bring back moving individual units or to change the economy to make it more hands-off.