"Why You Release Your Games Like That EZ?"
Early Access
This is going to be the first of hopefully a steady mid-week articles for A2Steam. These write-ups will be more topic orientated than touching on any particular game. Mostly my thoughts on some aspect of gaming or game culture.
Steam has for some time had a way for developers to put a game up that is still in development for people to play via a system called Early Access. Basically you are paying for alpha/beta vesion of the game. For smaller game studios they can use this as the way to get funding to finish a game, for others a way to get feedback from the public and fine tune a game. At least in concept that is what Early Access is for. The reality is of course all over the place. Survival games perpetually stuck in early access, busted games never finishing, and games actually using it for it's intended purpose successfully. Now it seems everything is Early Access...
As a general rule I stay away from games under this label. I will follow/wishlist those I'm interested in to keep track of their development (which is how my wishlist has bloated to 200+ titles) but purchase very few. A lot of this has to do with seeing a product in depth before its ready. It's like walking in on a roommate with their pants down and their wiener out. It's now to late. You can't unsee it and every time after is tainted by that experience. Seeing a game in its unfinished state, playing it, seeing the cracks and bugs, forms an opinion for me. Part of me is happy to see how issues are fixed and resolved, but a larger part of me is stuck on how much still doesn't work quite right (the "why is this still broken? problem) or how pre-release issues have badly affected the end result.
It's not that I don't like looking behind the curtain (or the concept of Early Access) - in fact I am fascinated by game development (heck I even worked in game development for a few years) but playing a broken buggy early access version of a game is radically different than reading about it's creation. Consequently I don't play many early access games unless I am really aware of the state the game is in and thus they probably won't appear in this blog.
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