If you're a PC gamer chances are you have some Early access titles in your library if you're not a PC gamer let me do a quick rundown, Early Access is essentially what we used to call alpha/beta testing, a game that is for the most parts playable but still requires work, bug fixes and numerous tweaks to call it a finished product, however the advent of Early Access as standard marketing tool has left the industry flooded and I do mean literally flooded with terrible,half assed, unfinishable(not a word) products that acts as scams, so lets break down some of the pros and cons of EA.
Great marketing, terrible product.
If you're like me you have more than a few EA games in your library and some of them are great however some of them you probably bought and thought "What the fuck is this" and uninstalled it and tried to get a refund, the breakdown of the draw of early access goes back a decade or so when it was called Alpha/Beta testing and it was only given to certain people and most times they were actually paid.
Yep, they were paid to play the games we now shell out 20-30 bucks for, now the logic is simple and easy to follow, release a game and make the community aware that it's EA and it's subject to any game in development meaning it can disappear or completely change in anyway, now for the i wanna say most part Early Access has lead to some great games getting into the market but the negatives don't outweigh the positives as i've talked about in previous articles market trends involving money always get replicated to oblivion.
Rust is the perfect example of a great EA title, however it spawned a thousand terrible games in early access that were abandoned or offered nothing new or interesting and gave rise to the micro transaction early access ala The WarZ which was literally a scam in Early Access form so much so they even stole League of Legends EULA and copy pasted it to their game but that is only one example of it.
Lets do a quick experiment, go to the steam home page and in the search bar type "Early Access" there are hundreds of games and DLC's that show up, to me DLC in an Early Access game should immediately be thrown off the market as it can't be interpreted as anything other than an exploitation, how the hell can you charge someone for downloadable CONTENT in a game that is in development, it's mind boggling, but i'm getting off track.
The marketing aspect of EA is that you can play this super awesome game right now, why wait? just buy it now! even if the game is a lag filled bug nest you don't have to wait for the polished product to come out, obviously not every EA title is like this but enough of them are that it warrants an internal audit of what exactly constitutes an Early Access title, because if you read the EULA of these games you can literally put Unreal Engine 4 base level on their and it's technically Early Access and some games are pretty much just this which is ridiculous.
Some games do need early access.
There are some games that need the revenue to keep creating the game in the development cycle, one of the best examples of this is Rust, Rust really kicked off the whole Early Access genre or at least it popularized it, Rust is a game that has been in development for a few years now and has undergone a complete transformation of it's iterations and has become a truly great game to play, I have nearly 1,100 hours on it myself and it's worth the $20 i bought it for, you could argue this was however to deal with Gary's popularity but whatever it was Rust is the trailblazer in this genre.
There are also some games that are just too big in scope and need player input before they can be released however again, this used to be something companies paid bug testers to do for them but this way does work better in some regards it's easier to find bugs with a million idiots than it is to find them with 10 geniuses.
On the other hand though there are some games that are really small in scope, indie devs and the like they require the money their sales generate to keep the game going I myself know a few indie devs with titles on the market who almost sent themselves broke just trying to get it "EA ready" and I sympathize with them as a fellow entrepreneur but that's not always the problem, the problem is that for every good hearted person on the market trying to make a break in the industry there's a mogul trying to exploit the genre for their bottom line or alternatively a scam artist trying to get the game just barely up to scratch to release then run away with the money.
It spawned a market trend of games nobody wants.
Early Access gave voice to anyone who can figure out Unreal Engine, there are probably 100's of games that copied rust in their own slightly different ways.
- Quick side note, i am ignoring DayZ for now as the game didnt really go anywhere.
Now i don't have the time or patience to literally draw a map of this however DayZ and Rust spawned so many god damn copies of themselves that it basically collapsed the genre underneath itself, games like The Forest, Hurtworld, ARK and many others sprung up a few months/years after the success of rust and it didn't stop if you take another trip to steam you'll see a lot of games there earmarked as "Early Access Survival" that has overwhelmingly negative scores and whose dev's have just disappeared of the face of the earth.
Now you may ask me "why is this such a bad thing?" well because it doesn't end and the people who bought these games were completely screwed from the outset all it really takes to make a fair amount of money on Early Access titles is about a month, the hype generates, word of mouth spread and it might even be featured on some sites, people get 10's of hours into the game and then the updates just stop and the devs go dark, you can't refund it because you've spent so much time in it and you can't really pursue legal action if you read the EULA's as you pretty much sign up for this when you buy the game.
So when one game falls, 5 more take it's place like a hydra it just keeps growing this is mainly because of a artificial inflation in the genre, when devs see an opening they pounce on it, either aware or unaware that this opening is the result of who came before them leaving a whole that didn't need to be filled and more times than not a dev team will either screw the playerbase or they themselves will be screwed because no one is buying their product.
I'm not saying there isn't a market there i myself do love some Early Access titles and do still buy them, what i'm saying is they're marketing the industry for millions when it's really in the mid 10's of thousands who actively purchase EA games and give the illusion of a much larger demand than their actually is.
When is it no longer Early Access?
DLC and micro transactions.
As soon as an EA title introduces cash shops or DLC, that's it, it is no longer an alpha or beta it's a finished product or usually confirmed as a scam, the War Z comes to mind in this regard, when a company begins to charge you for additional items or content in a game that is in development it's a finished product and the EA title is just a marketing strategy to protect themselves, if a Triple A game vanishes after charging people for additional content or items, you get lawsuits, if an Early Access title does it you get quoted the EULA because that's what you signed up for.Hosting tournaments or "pro leagues"
Yes this is aimed at PubG, I wrote a review on PubG and for the most part I love the game however it still has some very very deep flaws and bugs that need to be fixed, however it would seem that PlayerUnknown was more interested in sponsorship deals for his game than actually fixing the game that's supposed to be in development also as a side note, they felt the need to make a market place for cosmetic items before they introduced the most requested feature in the game vaulting over fucking walls, i understand this is "in development" but it doesn't take ANYONE 4 fucking months to introduce something that comes standard in UE4.The game is pretty much ready to launch.
There are a few games out there that are ready to launch now that have been on the EA market for months/years, Rust is a great example it's pretty much a finished product that could be touched up with patches every so often, yet they remain in the EA genre for some reason I don't know the logistics behind rust's development but I do know that it doesn't make sense to call it Early Access any more since it's pretty much a full game in it's own right, the only thing i can think of is that it stays in Early Access as a beacon to the genre to increase peoples interest, but again i have no real idea on this.
Where exacly does the market go?
Now this may seem a little bit elitist, but too bad, a lot of games on the EA market don't deserve to see the light of day, this is as much a fault of the developers as it is of Steam who gives them a platform to do this, I always saw Early Access as a means to an end, you have a game idea, you create it the best you can with the resources that you have, THEN you launch the Early Access, a perfect example of this is The Long Dark, a great game that relied heavily on contributions to create their game that launched this year and is very successful.
But what about games that perpetually stay in the development cycle? we're now nearing nearly a half decade since Early Access showed up and some of the pioneers of the genre are still in development and are in development hell, this is really the downside of Early Access because it's meant to be there so that players can give them their feedback on what needs to be done and what needs to be fixed, but as you know the vast majority of EA players aren't bug testers and don't provide feedback in anyway, they're simply there to play the game, that's the downfall of EA as a whole, it's marketed at making development smooth but ultimately leads to more problems because the people playing aren't helping.
Iv'e been alive long enough now that i remember both era's and iv'e been a alpha/beta tester before in games and still try to be but there's a flipside to what i said above, what happens when the developers just don't listen to their audience, again PubG is a perfect example people have been asking for months to fix common bugs and errors and add essential things into the game but the developers either ignore them or think they know better, this is what leads to divided opinion and leads to me to my final point and conclusion.
Early Access is a paid bug test forum.
You can go through any early access games forum and find hundreds of pages of complaints and feedback the vast majority of which go largely ignored, this is the ultimate problem with Early Access is that it gives too many people voices in the games development to the point the devs either get overwhelmed and ignore the player base, or they listen intently to the most vocal part and can end up screwing the game up entirely on the whims of some players.
This is a problem that is endemic to early access because it is a beta test however 10 years ago qualified people were paid to be in these tests so that they could get to the heart of the problems straight away, it's much easier to diagnose a problem with only 100 people talking than it is to even figure out somethings wrong when you have 2 million people yelling at you around the clock from every country in the world.
There are some games that do it correctly but unfortunately the vast majority doesn't and that's why i personally believe the gaming industry would be better off as a whole without Early Access or at least restricting access and monitoring games that get released in the market this is ultimately due to a question i'll ask you guys as well.
Just how long until we see a Triple A title in Early Access?