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Hot take: Buying an early-access game because you assume it'll be a lot better down the road is just silly. Just because no man's sky did a full 180 and made an awesome game from a shaky launch doesn't mean any other E-A game will follow the same trajectory.
If you're not happy with the feature set it has when you buy it, and you're not OK with the developer potentially dropping the title immediately, you probably shouldn't have bought it.
The NMS comparison is confusing. NMS didn't have an early access release. It just released and received substantial updates.
Perhaps Valheim is a better comparison?
I feel like I got my money's worth out of it, and I still continue to enjoy it, but plenty of people are really salty about the rate at which it's being finished. And understandably so; it's been years since it entered early access.
I haven't played the latest biome, I got sick of waiting 1+ year for each one and gave up on the game.
I think the obvious "early access" success story is Minecraft. That's what all these games are trying to copy.
But yeah, early (beta) MC was still a fun game and worth the 10 to 20 one would have paid for it. The actual "release" of the game was fairly arbitrary as it had huge updates after as well.
The unprecedented success of it led directly to early access as a commercialized concept. Prior to that, AAA/AA and other professionally made games just did actual releases, and indie/solo games were sometimes released in free beta to get playtesters.
The idea that the audience should fund the development from alpha through release is a wild concept that the capitalist class jumped on because they could sell you less and in many cases make the audience pay for what used to be considered a part of development (testing and polishing).
Frankly, I'm just amazed other industries haven't caught on yet. Music is getting there, with songs being released in very raw form sometimes and the constant stream of remixes and rereleases that are needed for chart ranking also allowing for an iterative approach to music production. How long until TV shows offer "early viewer" discounts where you pay 50% for a show with no visual FX that you can hope, if it's funded enough, will someday have CGI added?
Satisfactory early access has been a pleasure to be a part of. I’m genuinely glad I hopped on board during the EA phase rather than waiting for the full release (Which is actually coming this October). EA gets a bad rap because in fairness, it has been abused to hell and back. But being a part of the early access phase of lots of games can be a genuinely engaging opportunity.
Hard agree..... One of the most polished early access games I've played in a long time. I've started over at least 3 or 4 times now. Sometimes single player. Sometimes multi-player. Can't wait tor 1.0.
Looking forward to finally learning what the few WIP (work in progress) things will actually do....
Long Dark, the game that still hasn't finished their main story but is selling a secondary dlc story instead.
Not only that, they got pissy when GeForce Now started and originally used users' Steam keys to determine what games they could play. The Long Dark dev wanted to force players to pay for their game a second time to play it through GeForce
he’s calling for a specific rate of new expansions to keep players coming back, not crunching for "endless" growth
This annoys me. It's pure semantics.
To be fair, his argument seems to be more about maintaining a pace of development as an openly unfinished early access game who already has paying customers.
I'm still on the side of the other guy, who can't control that fact that a game that he listed as unfinished as a solo dev/small team blew up too early. I think that for a small team trying to build something that's not tiny, having continuous feedback from a dedicated group of customers allows you to make a better game, and having income allows you to spend more time developing it.
I would generally not recommend buying an early access game unless you either think it's already at a level you're happy with or you really value that back and forth process and want to "invest" in helping the game you value get made. You need to do it with your eyes open. But I don't think it's an inherent failing to not magically build a studio when a game blows up.