So, an interesting thing happened this past week. I've been talking to friends about how great Divinity: Original Sin is, and I've been overwhelmingly met with "Early access? pass." Ridiculous, right? Except, I also came to realize, I hadn't actually TOLD any of my friends it was early access, on purpose. I was avoiding saying it was early access, and kept saying "beta", trying to steer the conversation to how good the game is, and away from the fact that it had the "Early Access" label.
Why is this, I wondered? It's pretty obvious, though. A lot of games given "early access" are alpha builds at best, and Steams leniency has allowed the market to be flooded with hundreds upon hundreds of these games. It's becoming much like the mobile app store for games, where you'll have to wade through the piles of garbage to find anything worth playing. Early access has taken on a stigma, it's come to mean some indie trash game that's thrown on the market for a quick buck. A proof of concept in order to fund the actual game, or in order to fund another project completely; but a lot of these "early access" games never release, or never become complete. A lot of the time, you're left with an incomplete project, your money taken, and no one to blame but yourself, for falling for the same trick over again.
"You should know what you're buying when you buy early access," I hear it's defenders say. "If you don't want to buy an incomplete/alpha game, then don't." But the problem lies in the fact that a lot of these games have incredible premises. We don't have mid-tier developers anymore, trying out the weird, new things. We barely have a niche market, with companies like NISA and Atlus somehow still sticking around (both of which I love, I should mention!) but it's a very small market. In it's stead, we have indie developers coming out of the woodwork, trying new things and making those games we sorely miss. They're not afraid to cater to a niche audience; and with how starved some fans of these games are (I truly crave cRPGs) it's hard to not get excited, and throw your money at a game in your favored genre, just because you want to see it exsist. You want to get a taste of that sweet sweet game nectar, and at the point of purchase, you're perfectly content with what you get. Eventually though, you've run across the single map a few hundred times, and there's nothing left for you to do. You start craving more of the same experience, only to find the developer hasn't posted an update for 3 months. They aren't really talking about the current project, and no one knows if the game is abandoned or if the developer is just hard at work. You move on, because hey look! There's another game you might like!
The cycle continues, until out of 30 games you've bought, only 4 of them ever "release", and of those 4, maybe 1 is feature complete at "launch" with everything they promised. You start to get frustrated, and annoyed; it happens more often than not, and there's very little curation of the market to prevent this from happening time and time again. There's no expectations, because indie developers aren't bound by the same rules or regulations that companies are. There are no deadlines, no PR, no marketing team, and no investors to impress. There's no minimum stage of game required to release it on steam, you just get up and go. What you buy is what you get, and very often, that's all you get. Minecraft set the world on fire, with how often it updated, the wealth of content, and the fact that it was, in essence, a "early access" game. It was THE "early access" game, that showed a market of weary developers that there is money to be made out there, and that your zany idea might just work.
The over saturation, and consistency of disappointment, however, has completely ruined "early access" as a concept. If you release your game as "early access" these days, unless you're a known entity, or have enough to prove that your idea is leagues beyond and above others, you're going to get ignored. The system has now become a hindrance to those it was designed to help, and no one has anyone to blame but themselves.
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