I feel like having the early access label makes me more apprehensive about buying a game because of the amount of abandoned early access titles I own and being wary of it not having an ending. In the case of No Man’s Sky I feel like I would be less grateful for all the content adding updates. I might view it as just working towards a completed project rather than doing something nice for the community or doing it out of passion.
Buying a broken game does make me a lot less likely to buy new games from a developer immediately after the release.
Other examples could be Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 76, Halo MCC, and the remastered Grand Theft Auto trilogy.
Labeling it “early access” is definitely more honest - the dev might abandon it, but at least you didn’t buy it thinking it was a somewhat finished and polished product. And maybe people would be less grateful for the continuing updates, but then again, their opinion of the developer would never have been as low as it was for No Man’s Sky.
I agree it would be more honest but I’m wondering how the early access label would effect their sales.
Games like Project Zomboid and 7 Days To Die got a decent amount of attention from sites like YouTube but I’m wondering how many people stick around for the trickle of updates or will care when the game transition into a full release.
This is setting aside ethics obviously.
Well, the issue with those games is that they’re already played-out by the time they hit 1.0, at least that’s how it works for me with 7 Days To Die. Maybe there’s some new stuff I haven’t seen yet, but I already saw most of what the game has to offer in terms of gameplay and I don’t feel like picking it up again. Might be a general issue with games that spend a lot of time in early access.
With No Man’s Sky the difference might be that there barely was anything to do after release, so many people probably dropped it after maybe 10 hours.
deleted by creator
How I feel about cyberpunk. At least no man’s sky was an indie team that went through multiple lawsuits and a huge flood. CD project red has no excuse they just took a shit and wanted money for it
deleted by creator
Didn’t CD Projekt Red have a couple other bad releases?
I’ve read Witcher 3 had some pretty nasty bugs on release for example but it did seem like Cyberpunk 2077 was order of magnitude worse.
I thought there was another game released by CD Projekt Red that had some major issues on release but I don’t have the time to dig for articles about it.
deleted by creator
Just goes to show that NO company is worthy of your loyalty, regardless of their history.
Amen to that
Wouldn’t labeling it beta/early access imply that they’re more honest about what the game is and is not at the time of its release into early access/beta? Not as much reason to lie if you already said that it will take a couple of years before it’s done. Of course, you can still overstate your plans …
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I feel like that has to be pretty hard with how corporate pretty much every “AAA” game publisher is. So many are subsidiaries of subsidiaries and the parent company wouldn’t hesitate to push them to the curb.
They might also be worried about getting into a Duke Nukem Forever situation where they end up endlessly in development. They would end up having to fix issues while also keeping up with gaming trends.
