At least Steam is taking steps to make sure you don’t buy a shitty cash grab by labeling Early Access games that haven’t been updated in a while.
You hit a point where you realize you spent too much on games
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it’s a double edged sword really,
it allows some games to get enough funding to be finished. indi devs can basically start with a strong demo & then work on their project with an actual budget
and it allows other games to never be finished and still sold, indi devs can start strong, and then give up, and still make passive income out of people who don’t scroll down to reviews to check if people aren’t complaining about the game being abandoned, or in forever-early-acess-hell
Caveat emptor
I’ve not been upset with any of the Early Access games I’ve purchased, because I make sure to research the game before I buy. Just off the top of my head, factorio, satisfactory, and rimworld are all games that I purchased in early access and made it to full release and were worth a purchase well before release. Hell, even games like Dyson Sphere Program hasn’t been fully released and I’ve gotten more time out of that then multiple full games.
It should be marketed as beta test. I get not wanting to give out game for free or needing some funding to finish it, but its still an unfishished product.
IMO it should be something like so;
- Free to play for 5 hours or up to a certain level/about 20% play complete depending on the game style.
- pay to access rest of game. Full refund available any time or up to 15hrs/80% of game. With warning that stops game play until player is fully notified “if you keep playing past this point, you can not refund”
- players can be rewarded for participating as a beta tester if they actually provide constructive feedback.
- those rewards could be simply unlocking more time to play/levels, and a certain point they “earn” the whole game. Rewards can not be in-game advatages. Cosmetics is okay.
- Once game is released, standard refund rules take affect.
- if you paid for early access then it transfers to released game. If Dev try something sketchy like list the game under a new store page, any one who downloaded it regardless of payment will get a free key and Dev will be banned from listing anything early access.
- reviews from early access will be separated from release to keep outdated user feedback out of the mix.
Just throwing out a few ideas, trying to keep it fair to both dev and player, but obviously I’m not a game business expert.
pay to access rest of game. Full refund available any time or up to 15hrs/80% of game. With warning that stops game play until player is fully notified “if you keep playing past this point, you can not refund”
That would fuck over devs so hard I think
That’s kind of the point. If you don’t want to make the commitment to finishing the game, don’t charge people for early access.
You could make hurt less by offering partial refunds -100% refund at 50% complete -20% refund at 80% complete And whatever’s in between.
The entire point is to encourage the developer to keep making the game. If the developer stops developing or starts makes garbage their funding will be at risk.
The main concern is collections. If the developer runs away with the money, or just runs out of funds and can’t finish and can’t refund everybody, then yeah its kinda fucked.
Without really access we wouldn’t have Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a system that can be abused, sure, but it’s one of the few tools available for indie devs to be able to make larger scale games on scales that can compete with the big guys.
