Early Access; An Excuse?

I disagree. If it "fails" it's because of the game itself, yes. But, if failure is defined as selling a less than desirable amount or having a bad reaction from the public it would quite possibly be due to Early Access.

Most people whom were looking forward to it bought it when it came out on early access. They are today either burned out, giving it "thumbs down" on steam's recommendation page or just opened it once, got bored due to the lack of content and never played it again.

This is a very common occurrence. I for example played Starbound and enjoyed it, but since it was a pain to play it due to the lack of rebindable keys and repetitive gameplay and exploration I got bored. Since then they've added a lot of content but I doubt I'll be going back into it any time soon, if ever.

We live in an age were games are cheaper than ever due to sales, saturation and accessibility. It's a lot easier to get bored of a game when there are more games for a quarter of the price of a full-priced title five years ago coming out every day.

Back in 2003 I owned about ten games. 2/3 of them were super bad that I powered through out of boredom. The rest were games like Warcraft 3, Morrowind and Mafia. These were brilliant games that I barely ever put down. They were unique and did what they did the best of all games on the market. But would I play the same amount of them today? I doubt it. I'd finish them and leave them for a year or so.

And this is not nostalgia speaking. The average gamer owns between 50 to 100 games on their account. And most of them don't even touch these games. Say what you will about early access, but there's a reason to why games release DLC shortly after releasing the game. It makes a lot of money with little effort, something that these Early Access games are missing out on.

I don't agree with day one DLC, nor DLC in general. I prefer the good old expansion packs. But DLC brings in the money quite efficiently and if you were to knowingly waiver that income you are most definitely contributing to the possible negative outcome of the game.

A long rant, but I'm sure that early access affects the monetary success of a game. Sometimes it's for the better where they use their current hype to release and sell it. But it often comes down to making a quick buck, or otherwise known as a benevolent cash grab. You can see this with Chucklefish Studios whom are already working on two (1 - 2) new titles before even finishing their first one. It's losing revenue. It's simply not selling as well and they need a new title to work its magic.

 

I remember the good ol' days when we used to talk about how we wanted our first colonies to die, what ideas we had for biomes, and whether injuries should be done to limbs. You know, meaningful discussions about things that were actually important to this particular game, not long rants about other games having done bad things. Those were good times.

 

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

 

I prefer "Those who fail at history are doomed to repeat it". Works equally well with Math and Phys Ed.

 

Hah! About right!

 

"I'm telling you, no one can climb a rope, it's physically impossible!" - Seymour Skinner

 

Oh, I'm a bit late to this party - I rarely leave the DoD section of the forums...

Hello! I'm Simon Strange, and I'm a game designer. I've worked on lots of titles the past 16 years, but my current big project is Colossal Kaiju Combat. I got the bulk of my funding through Kickstarter about 17 months back, and we're prepping to launch our Early Access before June is over. All of which I present as introduction to emphasize that I have significant experience in this area.

Although I don't know Fruit very well, I immediately peg the original post as the work of someone who cares, and is trying to help. But I think the post very quickly gets off on the wrong foot, because it doesn't lay out a goal. Fruit dissects some possible problems - both real and community-perception-driven - which can result from Early Access. But unless we start this conversation by asking what GLG hopes to accomplish with Early Access we really don't have any place to offer suggestions on how to do it better.

Nicholas popped in and said that their main goal was to get a large number of players into the game. And if we take them at their word - then the CE Early Access should be a great success!