People hate Early Access because you're getting a quarter of a game, that also has built in excuses for not being balanced, polished, or maybe even functional. At pretty much full price in most cases.
I got in on Worlds Adrift early access. And it works as a "Space Engineers" alike, except multiplayer works, and balanced for a MMO sized player base... BUT the game is at such a tech demo level (a pretty good one), that hackers can literally use a hex editor to fundamentally change character physics and cool downs (pistol into machine guns). While also having item duplication bug after item duplication bug after item duplication bug after item duplication bug after item duplication bug.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Not sure what do you mean by people. Ashes of Creation launched recently and broke many records. Conan Exiles had a massive success on their EA launch. Some lips say hate, but overall statistics say love.
Ashes of Creation launched EA? Are you thinking of Citadel? If so, that has completely tanked. It dropped to a mixed review rating extremely quickly, and right now its at the bottom of page 4 of the top selling survival games. That's bad. I mean there is some total garbage ahead of it.
Conan Exiles has mixed reviews on steam. Any game on steam with a mixed review rating is utter garbage to the vast majority of people.
Plenty of EA games with positive reviews, but these two aren't it.
The real issue OP - vast majority of those listed are very poor games or in very poor/unfinished state.
That's why people hate them, the games are just not good.
If the game kicks ass and it's in early access - people would flock to it and love it regardless.
Before kickstarter - alpha games died in alpha state before the public even knew they existed - and yes vast majority of those sucked too.
So nothing changed - most games in alpha/early concept stages are NOT GOING TO SURVIVE to launch, that's the reality of game development - this is how it was before kickstarter and early access.
What early access/kickstarter did - is simply expose how few game concepts/alphas are actually worthy of launch, the reality didn't change.
Bottom line - out of 100 game concepts - less than 10 will pan out and only about 2 of those will turn out pretty decent.
No. What changed is that now, players are paying for this shit, and developers now look at their potential player base, not as something to make and keep satisfied, but something to exploit.
This does happen sadly as is the case whenever money is involved, there are those who see an opporottunity to exploit.
But again many game developers genuinely believe that they can deliver a great finished product, but thats just not how it works in reality.
Its sort of like every parent thinking how exceptionally smart their children are - in reality only a tiny % turn out exceptional as adults.
This was always the case with video games, even prior to EA and KS. Now we just get to see the truth with so many EA games failing to deliver
I wish I could believe that. But when I look at what's happening to COE......Same as The Repopulation. I cannot help but think, they knew this was more than likely and proceeded anyway.
HOLY CRAP! I can't believe you left Shroud of the Avatar off your list. They've been EA forever! Official launch date scheduled for 2014 and they've been in persistence for more than a year now, and they're still EARLY ACCESS and loving it.
List is from Massively. SotA, I've just given up thinking about that game unless a post really jumps out at me.
Not sure what do you mean by people. Ashes of Creation launched recently and broke many records. Conan Exiles had a massive success on their EA launch. Some lips say hate, but overall statistics say love.
Ashes of Creation launched EA? Are you thinking of Citadel? If so, that has completely tanked. It dropped to a mixed review rating extremely quickly, and right now its at the bottom of page 4 of the top selling survival games. That's bad. I mean there is some total garbage ahead of it.
Conan Exiles has mixed reviews on steam. Any game on steam with a mixed review rating is utter garbage to the vast majority of people.
Plenty of EA games with positive reviews, but these two aren't it.
"Is it any wonder that people are beginning to loathe crowdfunding and early access?"
This is OP's opening then he has listed a bunch of crowdfunded titles. That's why I also mentioned a crowdfunded title.
Conan sold well as an EA, means people don't EA. It got mixed reviews because people give mediocre games mixed reviews. That's irrelevant to EA itself.
PUGB broke 800,000 concurrent users, yet another EA title.
Constantine, The Console Poster
"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves." - Carl Jung
Not sure what do you mean by people. Ashes of Creation launched recently and broke many records. Conan Exiles had a massive success on their EA launch. Some lips say hate, but overall statistics say love.
Ashes of Creation launched EA? Are you thinking of Citadel? If so, that has completely tanked. It dropped to a mixed review rating extremely quickly, and right now its at the bottom of page 4 of the top selling survival games. That's bad. I mean there is some total garbage ahead of it.
Conan Exiles has mixed reviews on steam. Any game on steam with a mixed review rating is utter garbage to the vast majority of people.
Plenty of EA games with positive reviews, but these two aren't it.
"Is it any wonder that people are beginning to loathe crowdfunding and early access?"
This is OP's opening then he has listed a bunch of crowdfunded titles. That's why I also mentioned a crowdfunded title.
Conan sold well as an EA, means people don't EA. It got mixed reviews because people give mediocre games mixed reviews. That's irrelevant to EA itself.
PUGB broke 800,000 concurrent users, yet another EA title.
Talking about MMO's. If any non-MMO's are in the list I pasted, that's Massively's choice.
For me, avoiding EA has been really easy for one reason. I don't want to play and burn out on a game that will wipe servers countless times. By the time it launches (if it launches), I'll be ready for the next game. There is always one or two that make me contemplate my stance. Divinity 2 is a great example. Amazing game, but I'll happily wait for full release. After all, we live in a time where gaming options are limitless. Something else that is great will fill my time till then.
I have extremely mixed feelings about the subject matter.
On crowdfunding, this is a great idea in principle. The games industry has stagnated across the board. This is a combination of too much money involved at the top of the industry, resulting in risk-adverse investors, combined with big studios eating all the little studios and killing off creativity.
In steps crowdfunding. Can't get your risky idea funded by a professional investor? Go straight to the market instead. Eliminate the risk by proving there is a market for your idea upfront. If enough people agree, you have a market and that market just paid you to make their game.
The big problem with crowdfunding is that we, the people who donate money to ideas, are in no way qualified to pass judgement on the companies behind the idea. A professional investor will have the full background of the company and it's main employees. They will have masses of market research, plus personal experience, and so are qualified to make good judgement calls when investing in a new game.
We don't. We don't have that history. We don't have that data about the market. We don't know the people or the company setup behind the idea. All we have is the idea itself, plus our personal preference. This means we make terrible choices when it comes to donating. We donate based on the idea, not on the ability to deliver that idea, which is why so many crowd funded games either fail or turn out to be shit.
I personally think there must be a better solution to crowdfunding. We want to keep the community involvement in judging ideas, but leave the money stuff to professionals. For example, as a community we have largely decided to fund MMO sandboxes - be it PvE or PvP, fantasy or space - yet the amount of money involved is likely way to small to deliver a high quality experience. Wouldn't it be better if we could still somehow express our desire for sandbox MMOs (or whatever else we as a community want), yet have the larger studios do the development?
On early access......yeh, fuck that. If the game is not complete, you shouldn't be charging money. If you are charging money, then you're either morally compromised (greedy) or incompetent (couldn't successfully plan the project and ran out of money early). If the game is complete, then early access should only last for a short duration before the full release (like, 1 month max, but preferably 1week or less).
That said, whilst I personally avoid early access in almost all cases, there is such a wide variety of states of development with ea games that you need to make a judgement call on a case by case basis. You are paying money for entertainment, so if an early access game provides you with enough entertainment, what does it matter what status it has? I bought Prison Architect for this reason - despite being early access at the time, it had enough features and enough polish for me to consider it worth my money. I was only able to do this as I had friends playing it at the time who could "prove" it was fun. So far, no other early access game has been able to convince me to part with my money.
I'll buy early excess if it's a company with a decent track record or part of an RPG series I've played before. Sometimes even if the alpha reviews are good. But usually not if it's a new company doing something for the very first time and all their plans are currently in the early development stages or they have a history of messing games up. Crowd funding, usually not.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I think the original idea for early access was just to allow people who were going to buy the game anyways to test it out prior to playing, without having much QA experience. Also allowing them to see how the things handled on populated servers without having a billion people who didn't care about it trying it out to hate on it.
Now the idea is really skewed, but sometimes it still makes sense to me. Survival games never come out of early access so you are basically buying the game at this point. With MMO's it's harder to want to buy early access, the only reason I ever do it is to get the bonus packs in something I know will end up releasing. I bought into Albion early access, and really enjoyed the outcome of that. There are obvious cash grabs though, like when I bought into Starforge without really looking into it just on the premise of randomly generated weapons and survival modes, but that game just got dumped after EA. I also bought into H1Z1 EA, which honestly ended up being worth it for me simply because I got a copy of KOTK and played that quite a bit so far.
I think people hate it because of what it has become with a lot of companies who are just trying to grab at the people willing to spend early, and basically allowing games to come out in unfinished buggy states without intent to fix it prior to release.
1. Some people don't TEST early access games, they play them as if they are released. Consequently, they don't provide feedback or file bugs.
2. Of those who do, they really don't understand the difference between something that's truly bugged and a mechanic they just happen to dislike. This creates too much noise for developers and makes it hard to identify what to focus on.
Game developers need to start investing in qualified testers who know how to create a test harness and execute on it instead of relying on clueless players to fill that role.
Devs also need to go back to the 1-2 day alpha beta play times. Give players one new and one maxed out character and let them play for a weekend, provide feedback, and shut it down until the next build.
As a concept joining a game in development and help developers shape the game is very interesting. There are games that actually took the concept, made unique games with huge improvements over time because people were let in early, Kerbal space program and prison architect comes to mind, having huge hopes for rimworld and foxhole.
The problem is that early access quite often is about releasing a game really early to the public in the hope that the money will pay for the full development of the game. In most cases its about having people that paid to be bug testers and while it can be helpful for the developer it doesn't actually help shape the game which was the original intent of early access.
I like innovative indie development, I don't like the bombardment of hype for unfinished products.
Iselin: And the next person who says "but it's a business, they need to make money" can just go fuck yourself.
I see something I like the idea of being pitched, I do some research and then I invest some cash in a hope the idea will become something, I EA certain researched games in the knowledge that without it, they could never make the game, either because a new company or their refusal to take cash off a large publisher.
I do so fully in the knowledge that if I backed 10 games, I will get to see 2 fully fledged and released at best, to get to play a game early, or get some sort of return on my "Investment", is not my reasons for doing EA.
I expect to lose money and with that in mind I never invest more than I care about, and yes I did invest in SC, but lower end, and I do believe that product will make it.
But SC is a rare exception, when a crowd funded or EA game starts to ask funds from the public in the $5000 and above range and only have a few lower end options I go straight to cynical mode and dismiss the project as a whale fishing operation, Pantheon being one stands out to me in recent times, (researched and dismissed), Ashes game never got past 10 minutes of research,(BAD business history warning).
Only those who have actual morals do. There are still far too many people who are so obsessively in love with computer games (or Nintendo, or nostalgia, or... insert your own favourite fanboy example here) who look at it as a way to express their love, and really don't care what the actual result is. For them, throwing money towards the people who they think create their beloved IS the product. So for them, it works.
But for the rest of us, we grew up with our favourite programmers talking to "Computer and Video Games" or "Commodore User" or "Mean Machines" for decades of blaming those evil "Publishers" who throttled all innovation and creativity... heck "Amiga Power" went down fighting Sinister Global Mega Corporation to the last, and we loved them for that.
And Early Access / Crowd Funding was supposed to be the proof of what these wonderful talented individuals would do when left alone to be actual artists. We expected to see the results promised.
A vision which, when they've not proven incapable of living up too, many of them have actively betrayed it by making decisions worse than any publisher ever pushed them into. We instead we got questionable fundraising, poor products, or even outright scams.
We saw that not only were the people we admired not really those people, but that they expected us to keep on giving them money long after any sane person applying actual standards should have realised they were never going to give you what they promised.
"List is from Massively. SotA, I've just given up thinking about that
game unless a post really jumps out at me. "
What stopped you adding a single line to MassivelyOP's list about your own personal experiences and making that list not only yours, but more accurate and informative?
Massively themselves are trying desperately hard to be kind to Shroud; it, and Star Citizen, have been given an incredibly easy ride compared to the shocking state and issues around each project... because the media too wants to believe in their heroes.
But hero worship is childish; admire good people who do good things; but you're only worth the effort you KEEP making, not what you've done in the past. Hell, that was the whole point of plot of Ultima IV; "The Quest Of The Avatar Is Forever". The media however doesn't want to admit that Richard Garriott might actually be to blame for Shroud... or even Tabula Rasa before that. Or Ultima IX. Or...
So yes, Shroud is why I will never make the mistake of Kickstarting again. Early Access? I only buy if I like the product as it currently is. Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program proved worth it at the time, and have been great to their fans since.
Shroud though? A series that taught you to give gold to beggars and blood to the ill finds a "spiritual successor" in Shroud where you can pay $14,000 to get unique items in game by buying Lord British's real life blood... and where Real Money Traders with a history of abusive behaviour and scams control the entire economy, by design.
Again... Shroud shows how Early Access is often used as an excuse to completely betray one part of your audience because enough fools or foul people are real life rich enough to support you no matter what. Where as a true publisher, with an eye on actual sales to the public, would demand change or even pull the plug when they realised you didn't have a viable product.
Turns out, sometimes the publisher was probably right.
Is it any wonder that people are beginning to loathe crowdfunding and early access? Compare the following list from Massively Overpowered to the number of MMO's that have actually launched in the last couple of years. Most of these games have our money already, And yet, how many of them stand a chance of ever making it out of development to a successful launch and beyond? My guess is, not many.
Compare the time between the end of the kickstarter and today's current date and the time it takes to actually develop an MMO. Even for a fully funded AAA project.
I can understand people who are unwilling to continue with the crowdfunding / early access campaign until some good projects have actually hit full release that started with a kickstarter.
I think people acting like crowdfunding and early access are a proven failure already because nothing good is out have no concept of the time involved in making an MMO though.
Kickstarting is not a recent enough trend for any decent MMOs to come from it yet.
Been messing around with what they have released currently in Star Citizen the last couple of days. Not too shabby for the most part.
That's the stuff that's right around the corner. A lot of is testable already. Some of it isn't. "Vaporware" is really getting good these days.
MMOs are the sum of their features, therefore it is mostly irrelevant how good some of parts are.
The two main questions at this point is what is the release scope (mostly defined) and when will SQ42 and the larger MMO formally launch with the MVP feature set for each.
Most indie efforts ranging from low budget CU which I backed over 4 years ago to SC with its massive budget can't begin to confirm a formal launch date.
In fact both of these titles can't give a beta date yet despite having more than enough time to reduce the cone of uncertainty.
So to a person like me who is taking the position of not playing a game until 6 months to a year post final release, the near horizon looks pretty dim, at least in the MMORPG space.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Been messing around with what they have released currently in Star Citizen the last couple of days. Not too shabby for the most part.
That's the stuff that's right around the corner. A lot of is testable already. Some of it isn't. "Vaporware" is really getting good these days.
Eldurian, don't forget, recently informed us that he is a Real Money Trader, and is heavily invested in Star Citizen and Shroud for that very purpose. But I'm sure that this post isn't biased in the slightest bit into encouraging people to join a game he expects to make a profit off. Not at all.
Recently, I had the pleasure of discovering that one of the most awful people in the Shroud community, who had insulted and abused the critics, whilst constantly posting how he didn't RMT, yet he knew a "friend" had made their way up to a player owned town purely through in game buying and selling... turned out to have changed his profile name to hide that he was indeed an RMT, and was actually the person behind organising the review bombing of Shroud on Steam. As well as haranguing people to not undercut the market to help others, because it would kill the game... he actually listed helping people find joy in the game as a negative.
So here's another reason why people hate Early Access then...
Even before the game is even finished, you end up finding yourself in the middle of exceptionally dishonest attempts to manipulate public perception of it, and silence critics because of either a financial, or emotional investment in it being seen as a success. What people actually think when they get into game becomes irrelevant; people have to buy it no matter what, so you can either sell them some of your digital stock before they become disillusioned and quit, or just buy the game so you can point to sales figures and say "See? Told you I was right!".
The idea of open criticism so the developers themselves can address issues and make a game people actually want to play often goes right out the window.
And even when Developers might want to avoid that and want the useful feedback (It's doubtful Shroud's do, but Star Citizen I don't know enough about to say) unless they spend a lot of time sleuthing out their user base to work out who are the unselfish, honest actors and who is just putting out bumf to try and sucker people in to then sell them the add ons you're fundraising on, they will only be able to judge who is loudest, not best informed.
Just like Democracy, it's a wonderful idea in practice... until the snouts get into the troughs.
Comments
Cryomatrix
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
I got in on Worlds Adrift early access. And it works as a "Space Engineers" alike, except multiplayer works, and balanced for a MMO sized player base... BUT the game is at such a tech demo level (a pretty good one), that hackers can literally use a hex editor to fundamentally change character physics and cool downs (pistol into machine guns). While also having item duplication bug after item duplication bug after item duplication bug after item duplication bug after item duplication bug.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Conan Exiles has mixed reviews on steam. Any game on steam with a mixed review rating is utter garbage to the vast majority of people.
Plenty of EA games with positive reviews, but these two aren't it.
I mean, why not? it's not their money.
A man who fears nothing is a man who loves nothing; and if you love nothing, what joy is there in your life?
List is from Massively. SotA, I've just given up thinking about that game unless a post really jumps out at me.
This is OP's opening then he has listed a bunch of crowdfunded titles. That's why I also mentioned a crowdfunded title.
Conan sold well as an EA, means people don't EA. It got mixed reviews because people give mediocre games mixed reviews. That's irrelevant to EA itself.
PUGB broke 800,000 concurrent users, yet another EA title.
Talking about MMO's. If any non-MMO's are in the list I pasted, that's Massively's choice.
On crowdfunding, this is a great idea in principle. The games industry has stagnated across the board. This is a combination of too much money involved at the top of the industry, resulting in risk-adverse investors, combined with big studios eating all the little studios and killing off creativity.
In steps crowdfunding. Can't get your risky idea funded by a professional investor? Go straight to the market instead. Eliminate the risk by proving there is a market for your idea upfront. If enough people agree, you have a market and that market just paid you to make their game.
The big problem with crowdfunding is that we, the people who donate money to ideas, are in no way qualified to pass judgement on the companies behind the idea. A professional investor will have the full background of the company and it's main employees. They will have masses of market research, plus personal experience, and so are qualified to make good judgement calls when investing in a new game.
We don't. We don't have that history. We don't have that data about the market. We don't know the people or the company setup behind the idea. All we have is the idea itself, plus our personal preference. This means we make terrible choices when it comes to donating. We donate based on the idea, not on the ability to deliver that idea, which is why so many crowd funded games either fail or turn out to be shit.
I personally think there must be a better solution to crowdfunding. We want to keep the community involvement in judging ideas, but leave the money stuff to professionals. For example, as a community we have largely decided to fund MMO sandboxes - be it PvE or PvP, fantasy or space - yet the amount of money involved is likely way to small to deliver a high quality experience. Wouldn't it be better if we could still somehow express our desire for sandbox MMOs (or whatever else we as a community want), yet have the larger studios do the development?
On early access......yeh, fuck that. If the game is not complete, you shouldn't be charging money. If you are charging money, then you're either morally compromised (greedy) or incompetent (couldn't successfully plan the project and ran out of money early). If the game is complete, then early access should only last for a short duration before the full release (like, 1 month max, but preferably 1week or less).
That said, whilst I personally avoid early access in almost all cases, there is such a wide variety of states of development with ea games that you need to make a judgement call on a case by case basis. You are paying money for entertainment, so if an early access game provides you with enough entertainment, what does it matter what status it has? I bought Prison Architect for this reason - despite being early access at the time, it had enough features and enough polish for me to consider it worth my money. I was only able to do this as I had friends playing it at the time who could "prove" it was fun. So far, no other early access game has been able to convince me to part with my money.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Congrats. You made a guess.
I am confused about your point. I see a bunch of games lumped together when they should be evaluated individually.
You stay sassy!
Now the idea is really skewed, but sometimes it still makes sense to me. Survival games never come out of early access so you are basically buying the game at this point. With MMO's it's harder to want to buy early access, the only reason I ever do it is to get the bonus packs in something I know will end up releasing. I bought into Albion early access, and really enjoyed the outcome of that. There are obvious cash grabs though, like when I bought into Starforge without really looking into it just on the premise of randomly generated weapons and survival modes, but that game just got dumped after EA. I also bought into H1Z1 EA, which honestly ended up being worth it for me simply because I got a copy of KOTK and played that quite a bit so far.
I think people hate it because of what it has become with a lot of companies who are just trying to grab at the people willing to spend early, and basically allowing games to come out in unfinished buggy states without intent to fix it prior to release.
1. Some people don't TEST early access games, they play them as if they are released. Consequently, they don't provide feedback or file bugs.
2. Of those who do, they really don't understand the difference between something that's truly bugged and a mechanic they just happen to dislike. This creates too much noise for developers and makes it hard to identify what to focus on.
Game developers need to start investing in qualified testers who know how to create a test harness and execute on it instead of relying on clueless players to fill that role.
Devs also need to go back to the 1-2 day alpha beta play times. Give players one new and one maxed out character and let them play for a weekend, provide feedback, and shut it down until the next build.
24/7 access should be reserved for release.
~~ postlarval ~~
The problem is that early access quite often is about releasing a game really early to the public in the hope that the money will pay for the full development of the game. In most cases its about having people that paid to be bug testers and while it can be helpful for the developer it doesn't actually help shape the game which was the original intent of early access.
I like innovative indie development, I don't like the bombardment of hype for unfinished products.
I do so fully in the knowledge that if I backed 10 games, I will get to see 2 fully fledged and released at best, to get to play a game early, or get some sort of return on my "Investment", is not my reasons for doing EA.
I expect to lose money and with that in mind I never invest more than I care about, and yes I did invest in SC, but lower end, and I do believe that product will make it.
But SC is a rare exception, when a crowd funded or EA game starts to ask funds from the public in the $5000 and above range and only have a few lower end options I go straight to cynical mode and dismiss the project as a whale fishing operation, Pantheon being one stands out to me in recent times, (researched and dismissed), Ashes game never got past 10 minutes of research,(BAD business history warning).
Only those who have actual morals do. There are still far too many people who are so obsessively in love with computer games (or Nintendo, or nostalgia, or... insert your own favourite fanboy example here) who look at it as a way to express their love, and really don't care what the actual result is. For them, throwing money towards the people who they think create their beloved IS the product. So for them, it works.
But for the rest of us, we grew up with our favourite programmers talking to "Computer and Video Games" or "Commodore User" or "Mean Machines" for decades of blaming those evil "Publishers" who throttled all innovation and creativity... heck "Amiga Power" went down fighting Sinister Global Mega Corporation to the last, and we loved them for that.
And Early Access / Crowd Funding was supposed to be the proof of what these wonderful talented individuals would do when left alone to be actual artists. We expected to see the results promised.
A vision which, when they've not proven incapable of living up too, many of them have actively betrayed it by making decisions worse than any publisher ever pushed them into. We instead we got questionable fundraising, poor products, or even outright scams.
We saw that not only were the people we admired not really those people, but that they expected us to keep on giving them money long after any sane person applying actual standards should have realised they were never going to give you what they promised.
What stopped you adding a single line to MassivelyOP's list about your own personal experiences and making that list not only yours, but more accurate and informative?
Massively themselves are trying desperately hard to be kind to Shroud; it, and Star Citizen, have been given an incredibly easy ride compared to the shocking state and issues around each project... because the media too wants to believe in their heroes.
But hero worship is childish; admire good people who do good things; but you're only worth the effort you KEEP making, not what you've done in the past. Hell, that was the whole point of plot of Ultima IV; "The Quest Of The Avatar Is Forever". The media however doesn't want to admit that Richard Garriott might actually be to blame for Shroud... or even Tabula Rasa before that. Or Ultima IX. Or...
So yes, Shroud is why I will never make the mistake of Kickstarting again. Early Access? I only buy if I like the product as it currently is. Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program proved worth it at the time, and have been great to their fans since.
Shroud though? A series that taught you to give gold to beggars and blood to the ill finds a "spiritual successor" in Shroud where you can pay $14,000 to get unique items in game by buying Lord British's real life blood... and where Real Money Traders with a history of abusive behaviour and scams control the entire economy, by design.
Again... Shroud shows how Early Access is often used as an excuse to completely betray one part of your audience because enough fools or foul people are real life rich enough to support you no matter what. Where as a true publisher, with an eye on actual sales to the public, would demand change or even pull the plug when they realised you didn't have a viable product.
Turns out, sometimes the publisher was probably right.
I can understand people who are unwilling to continue with the crowdfunding / early access campaign until some good projects have actually hit full release that started with a kickstarter.
I think people acting like crowdfunding and early access are a proven failure already because nothing good is out have no concept of the time involved in making an MMO though.
Kickstarting is not a recent enough trend for any decent MMOs to come from it yet.
That's the stuff that's right around the corner. A lot of is testable already. Some of it isn't. "Vaporware" is really getting good these days.
The two main questions at this point is what is the release scope (mostly defined) and when will SQ42 and the larger MMO formally launch with the MVP feature set for each.
Most indie efforts ranging from low budget CU which I backed over 4 years ago to SC with its massive budget can't begin to confirm a formal launch date.
In fact both of these titles can't give a beta date yet despite having more than enough time to reduce the cone of uncertainty.
So to a person like me who is taking the position of not playing a game until 6 months to a year post final release, the near horizon looks pretty dim, at least in the MMORPG space.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
MAGA
With them, the "shiny shiny" wins every time.
~~ postlarval ~~
Eldurian, don't forget, recently informed us that he is a Real Money Trader, and is heavily invested in Star Citizen and Shroud for that very purpose. But I'm sure that this post isn't biased in the slightest bit into encouraging people to join a game he expects to make a profit off. Not at all.
Recently, I had the pleasure of discovering that one of the most awful people in the Shroud community, who had insulted and abused the critics, whilst constantly posting how he didn't RMT, yet he knew a "friend" had made their way up to a player owned town purely through in game buying and selling... turned out to have changed his profile name to hide that he was indeed an RMT, and was actually the person behind organising the review bombing of Shroud on Steam. As well as haranguing people to not undercut the market to help others, because it would kill the game... he actually listed helping people find joy in the game as a negative.
So here's another reason why people hate Early Access then...
Even before the game is even finished, you end up finding yourself in the middle of exceptionally dishonest attempts to manipulate public perception of it, and silence critics because of either a financial, or emotional investment in it being seen as a success. What people actually think when they get into game becomes irrelevant; people have to buy it no matter what, so you can either sell them some of your digital stock before they become disillusioned and quit, or just buy the game so you can point to sales figures and say "See? Told you I was right!".
The idea of open criticism so the developers themselves can address issues and make a game people actually want to play often goes right out the window.
And even when Developers might want to avoid that and want the useful feedback (It's doubtful Shroud's do, but Star Citizen I don't know enough about to say) unless they spend a lot of time sleuthing out their user base to work out who are the unselfish, honest actors and who is just putting out bumf to try and sucker people in to then sell them the add ons you're fundraising on, they will only be able to judge who is loudest, not best informed.
Just like Democracy, it's a wonderful idea in practice... until the snouts get into the troughs.