I am going to start off this mornings post by linking a tweet that I read yesterday morning. When I first processed this shortly after posting my blog for the day… I had the immediate reaction of “no it didn’t, that game is old”. Please note I am in no way singling out GameSpace here or picking on them, because much like I did in my own inbox they received a press release talking about how the game was coming out of Early Access. I am not even picking on Fantasy Strike to be truthful, because they are only the latest instance of this to catch my ire. The problem is that in my mind this is a game that launched roughly two years ago.
If game sales are based upon the amount of hype that you can generate for your game, doing Early Access means whatever hype you could have generated was spent on that. For me personally a game launches the moment you start taking money for access to it. I also feel like a game doesn’t get a pass for me while it has an alpha, beta or whatever the next industry catch phrase for “unfinished” is attached to it. Once you start accepting money to let players play your game, you have launched.
I think the core problem here is we have two different offshoots for why games claim to be going into Early Access. The first is as a funding vehicle, and if you are a small studio and need an infusion of cash especially if you are self publishing… then you should feel zero shame about using this. It does not give you the rights to make a big deal about it when you “officially” launch other than maybe a pat on the back and a hearty “good job” for not imploding along the way. I think the ideal scenario was that of Starbound that held back a massive update to release to their fans as a sort of last hurrah for leaving the Early Access system and going into official release mode.
The second route seems to be in a scenario when a game wants the fans to feel like they have shaped the end product. While I have vacillated wildly about on this point… I am arriving at the stance that this is a horrible idea. In truth fans should have very little say in the design of the game and really should only be engaged with the final fit and polish… as was traditionally the role of a closed or open beta process. I will always have opinions on the way things should have been done, but the truth is as a fan and a blogger I have no clue at all what I actually want until I get my hands on it and play it.
There have been many times that a game on paper sounds like everything that I ever wanted. Then I start playing and I realize that it was a horrible idea. Also similar there have been many times I wound up playing a game that I never thought I would like and it ended up eating two or three weekends of my time. My ability to decide what I actually like is flawed… and I think it is similarly flawed for every other gamer out there. We fundamentally do not know what it is that makes an experience that we will enjoy. We are really good at determining what it is we do not like, and tend to focus on eradicating those things rather than actually promoting the things that we enjoy. So in the end you wind up with experienced that have been carefully curated by people screaming at the top of their lungs telling the studio what not to do.
The truth is, if I had my druthers… I would not even know a game existed until three to four months before it launches. I know we have an entire industry built upon the constant stream of hype surrounding the game release cycle, but I am not entirely certain this is a good thing. During the EGM era of games magazines you had a month to month cycle of content to fill… now if you don’t get the eyeballs within the first few hours of an announcement you have lost that revenue. This leads to a very short sighted and hyperbolic approach to trying to be as sticky as humanly possible to cash in on that brief blip when people are hungry for more information.
This has lead to a situation where announcements are timed for all of the major conferences and are comprised of about 90% vaporware and good intentions. The tale of the Anthem development cycle is all too familiar with E3 demos being loosely cobbled together and not representative of the final product at all. Hell this has even become its own kind of content, where you take trailers that were first shown and bash the product based on how much it did not live up to those expectations. We are a snake that is eating itself and I fear that eventually this is all going to end up with an Atari style crash if we are not careful.
This could be a very large conversation, and it isn’t relegated to video games. Development costs are through the roof, and traditional investment options are looking for safer bets/better returns.
Makes sense in that case to crowdsource (which is what EA really is). Course, that well is drying up too.
It’s not like the MTX/RNG monstrosity is going away either. Nearly all mobile profits are based on that model, and more than half of EA’s income is FIFA alone.
I fell off the hype train some time before my last post blog post over a year ago. Can’t even remember the last early access event I participated in. Scooter and I are perfectly happy, for now, playing the almost-7-year-old Guild Wars 2. Continuing to follow new games coming out (and blogging about them) is a great avocation, but sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
Steam tries to make something of a big deal about games coming out of early access with a monthly list they publish, but aside from a few rare exceptions (such as Minecraft in the early days or PUBG more recently), there is no big boost in sales or popularity when that transition has been made. The core audience has been established. The studio has essentially been allowed early access to their sales, usually at a discount.
One trend I have noticed is that when early access ends, some devs have started walking away from a game to work on something new. That is perhaps how it ought to be, you ship a game then start on another. But with early access it can feel like going from a period with a lot of dev interaction and updates to silence marked by little more than an increase in the price of the game. That is reality, but the optics can be bad for your early adopters and you will see reviews about devs “abandoning” a game, where that corresponds with leaving early access.
Preach!
I have nothing else to add!