Early access games.

A couple of posts ago I talked about some of the differences between the gaming industry now vs the industry way back when. I mentioned a platform called Steam. The topic for this post is something that has risen the attention of many gamers lately. Many gamers love early access games, but I am one of the many who are a bit untrustworthy when it comes to these indie developers. Early access games are games which you can buy on Steam or many other programs where you can buy video games to download on to your computer. Early access games are games which are not complete, or not fully playable to the developers goals for the full release of the game. So the term "early access" refers to the consumer that you can buy a game which is incomplete but playable to an extent with many features, and many other features not yet implemented or put into the game by the developers yet. So it can be a positive thing for the developers and the consumers because the game will get recognition and play tested by the consumer, and the developers will be supported and get a grasp on how their game may do in the competitive market. Now the problem, which I will get to in a moment is not how all early access games are bad, many early access games so great potential and I would happily put money down to support, but there are many other games and small game developer teams who may take your money and run.  

Many games in the past have went up on early access and hundreds of thousands of dollars were paid by the consumer to the developers to continue the game only to have the developer go MIA on a vacation to Aruba. Games like The Stomping Land, which was a highly popular game being on the top 3 list of steam for a good while and out of no where the developer takes the game off of early access and the money everyone paid to play it went with it. I often wonder how many people called up Steam in an outrage for their money back when Steam cannot do anything about it. It is the consumers choice and risk to buy the game. Another great example of an early access game that is one of the most downloaded games of all time is Dayz. The developers of this game promised to have all of these amazing features at the full release of their game and in the past two years the game has been out hardly any of these features have been added. I will also note that the game is still in ALPHA! I have never heard that a game would stay in an early alpha state for more than two years. It is absolutely crazy. My fear of the problem of early access games isn't the part about untrustworthy developers or game companies. It is the consumers gullibility to be sucked into buying a product that may have a grim to no future at all. I will relate this to games of the past because when you used to buy a game it was a full game. When you walked into the store to buy the new game disc or the new game cartridge you were buying something that was full, something that was created to be played by every pixel. The game you were buying was being played like it is meant to. Now you buy a game which is most likely early access because the trend is starting to show that there are more early access games every day then there are complete games. My fear is that early access will be come the new norm in gaming. I don't want every developer or every company handing out a half complete product. If it is a readably accepted way of releasing games it may every well become the normal way of producing games.