Hot take - while it’s obviously greedy for the publishers to be charging for this, the real problem is the idiots who are paying.
Agreed, I don’t blame the publishers for this. It’s clearly working on some amount of population that makes it worthwhile when they do the spreadsheets. The only beta game I’ve purchased recently lets you self-host servers and I was happy with the state it was in even if it was dropped and died all together. I refuse to purchase just about anything else that is still in “beta” or “early access”. I remember when “Beta” meant “download this game and play it… If you like it you can buy it next month”.
It’s that population that actively makes games worse for all of us as publishers can choose to just be lazy. I was stupid happy when BG3 got the praise it got on launch. That’s what it used to be… that’s how it should be.
I’ll grab early access for either a new studio or a studio with a history of taking their early access to full completion so that there can be more options, but not for IP that’s in the hands of mega studios/ones with a long history or ones with a history of giving up on previous early access projects.
I got Valheim, Rust, and Raft all early access and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them as well as seeing how they have been developed since I don’t know much about game dev and it’s interesting to me. Kinda like watching plants grow.
It’s that population that actively makes games worse for all of us
That’s exactly why I don’t cut them any slack. Their dumb choices don’t just harm themselves - they harm me and all other gamers, insofar as they’ve made it so that publishers can get away with putting out unfinished, buggy, unbalanced crap.
Sure - the gamers might spend a while ineffectually bitching on forums and handing out 1 star reviews, but that’s just meaningless noise. The ONLY thing that matters to the publishers is whether or not people buy the game, and those dunderheads not only buy the game - they line right up to buy the next one too.
Or, now, line right up to pay extra for early access to the next one.
The average person is fucking stupid, and half of the population is stupider than that. It’s why gatekeeping is good, it’s why popularity is bad, it’s why the hipsters were right.
My favorite is it’s $60 game with a promise to not be scum, then 6 months later add in the scummy shit and battle passes so you can’t refund it.
Well, if a publisher pulls that crap, you need to remember and then never buy anything from them again.
At this point its more of a whitelist than a blacklist. It happens a lot and people just go on like they didn’t just get ripped off.
It’s a relatively new entry in the ‘bullshit companies are pushing’ category. It only works as long as the game isnt pure garbage that is going to lose 90% of its playerbase in two weeks and the die out in less than a year… Since everything is trying to be live service these days.
I mean … the consumer plays a bigger part in the practice by enabling publishers.
I 100% blame consumers for this. If it wasn’t profitable they wouldn’t do it.
Maybe this article doesn’t mean thing like ffxiv, but ffxiv did something similar. In essence if you bought it before it early released, you got to play it those 3 days early. If you wanted to play it that time you could have just bought it and if you didn’t you just bought it 3 days later and played it anyway.
I think that for an online game that’s a great idea, specially ffxiv, because the people that are going to play the new expansion probably bought it weeks prior to the early access and people who didn’t probably haven’t still finished the last expansion, so they really have no real incentive to play the new one like NOW, all they do is tax the servers for all the people that actually want to play the new content.
It’s also a way to limit the user base into two peaks so that the servers don’t die too much.
I’m completely against charging extra for the early access though. Early access maybe good, paying for it obviously bad.
