No doubt! Literally been there. Treading the line between harnessing the energy of the diehards and keeping them from turning things toxic over whatever hobby horse they’re riding at the moment, when it’s in conflict with the team’s priorities or philosophies, is tough! Luckily amazing talents make their way into community management every day thanks to the respect and the compensation afforded by the career.
I’m convinced that often times with this process you also run the risk of the diehard and vocal having an outsized influence on design.
A big part of why I’m keeping things under wraps for as long as I am. Community management will be a huge time sink and going in I want to make sure I can effectively communicate the philosophy and vision right upfront.
And yet you play the battlefields…i know, i know…i’m just teasing ;)
On early access though, I’ve gone through some phases. First I was a fantastic supporter; what a great idea! Then, particularly after some bad “releases”, I pulled back and didn’t buy any. Now, I mostly avoid, but I will pick and choose certain titles. I also felt it necessary to create a subcategory in my steam library just to track this (21 games).
My biggest beef, other than established AAA developers using it, is the way steam handles it. Release date? These game aren’t released yet, they should have no release date. It looks like some store pages now show Early Access Release Date, but they also show Release Date and they’re often the same thing. As a consumer, this makes it really hard for me to identify sometimes whether software is released or not. 7 days to die, a notorious early access title, shows a release date of Dec 13, 2013. I love the game, but right now, they’re on (Alpha!) version A20.4 and it’s still nowhere near an actual release.
I just realized I’m playing an Early Access game for the first time in a long long time right now. It’s Starfield, and it’s only 5 days early access, but it feels really polished, it doesn’t feel like an Early Access game. This whole 5 or 6 days of Early Access thing is an interesting way of companies making some extra money. I honestly don’t know what to think of it. I think the games are already in a pretty polished state. Certainly 5 or 6 days aren’t going to make that big a difference in the number of bugs. I’m kind of scratching my head on why I’m not mad at them for doing this. Instead it feels like a way for a fan like me to show my appreciation, maybe? It’s weird.
I can understand a 5-day headstart when it comes to an online game because there’s value in trying to spread out the initial rush of new players a little bit so the queues don’t get too long and that sort of thing. But for an offline game like Starfield? They’re flat-out exploiting their customers for an extra $30 to play over Labor Day weekend. I think it’s pretty gross.
Does paying more to get access early make it early access?
All of this.
Ah, but now that we’ve seen BG3 benefit from a long early access period, has anyone changed their opinion, or did BG3 further cement your thoughts?
I don’t have much of a problem with Early Access conceptually. There are some games that have put it to good use and I would put BG3 in that category. The system is rife for abuse though and Steam is littered with hundreds of abandoned and half finished projects when games launch with major problems, very little content, and are quickly forgotten.
BG3 didn’t change my opinion much either way. I’m not completely opposed to EA but I’m pretty cautious when I see a game launch with that tag. I’ve been burned too many times, so I need proof they actually have something there and have demonstrated they’re able to work towards a realistic 1.0 before I want to drop money on it.
Star field and D4 didn’t have early access to fix bugs or improve systems. They were strictly designed to induce FOMO and sell plastic trinkets. The junky physical stuff helps the rationalization go down easy.
I don’t have a problem with games like BG3 that actually leverage their early access. I’m not interested in being a beta tester, but I get it.
Those two classes of “early access “ should not be conflated.
Calling Starfield’s release “early access” is an insult to early access. But since I already loathe early access, I don’t really mind except for semantic reasons.
Yeah, apples and oranges.
With Starfield coming to Game Pass, I don’t really mind the pay-to-play-early thing they did. In fact, I don’t think I mind it at all. It’s fun to be able to play ahead of others and it’s fun to read impressions from those who did. It’s just more options for the consumer. My glass is half full.
Surely we wouldn’t get stuck in how things used to be or, heaven forfend, have difficulty adapting to change!
Yeah, it was fun reading impressions from those that jumped into Diablo 4 early, even though I didn’t.
And in this case, Starfield feels almost like a love letter to me personally, that I feel like I haven’t paid them enough, if that makes sense?
The $30 includes a preorder for the first story expansion ‘Shattered Space’, so it’s not just the queue-jumping you’re paying for.
I know that doesn’t change the distaste around the whole concept as it’s obviously still designed to get more money up-front, but I don’t think it ends up being a huge amount if you had planned to buy expansions anyway.
Part of the problem is it is used to describe a spectrum of different practices. From something like Bethesda did with Starfield, to Larian using it for a long feedback cycle/iterative development process while already having development funding secured, to others who use it as a lifeline to fund development.
You have things like Factorio and Starsector, which I’m not sure were entirely/very dependent on it for funding development, but spent years (and continue to do so in the case of starsector) refining a product that most considered 1.0 worthy well before release. Then there are the things that end up never make it to the end. I imagine doing it properly requires a lot of discipline to walk the line between refining/improving the project and feature creep.
One is Early Access game development, the other is early access to a finished game.
(I suppose the word “finished” should be in quotes.)
You also get the first expansion on release, plus some cosmetics.
But, honestly, I don’t consider soaking the people who can afford $30 for extras to be exploitation, exactly. Those are the people game companies should be shaking down for access to minor perks.
They also could just… not. And allow anyone dropping $70 on a video game to play over the long (in the US) weekend. :) I don’t think game companies should be shaking down anyone for money.
Fair point about the first expansion being included. If someone is already wanting that, that’s not too bad really. I think I’m in the opposite direction of the target audience for a “story expansion” in a Bethesda game, unfortunately!
The only reason I paid the $30 was because I’m on Game Pass and already getting it for “free”, and I usually end up buying games I play and enjoy on GP to support the developer anyway.
Bethesda RPGs are usually day one purchases for me, usually, but this time around I wasn’t really all that excited for Starfield being that it was a new IP and nothing I saw really sold me on it. So, I could have waited a few more days, but then got caught up in all the excitement. I also justified it with it being a DLC pre-order, so that helped. But also the idea that even if I didn’t love it, I was sure to get some enjoyment out of it.
That was a big factor for me as well.