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.
In the case of No Man’s Sky specifically, probably still pretty bad. It wasn’t “lackluster” it was straight up false advertising. What they did was deceptive and intentional.
They’ve done a TON since then to try to make it right, but that doesn’t excuse their initial crime.
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
I almost jumped on the Cyberpunk bandwagon just because it was CD Projekt Red. Kept telling myself they wouldn’t stoop to Hello Games’s level. …and they didn’t stoop quite that low, but for CD Projekt Red to put out something as shitty as Cyberpunk was a shock.
Fortunately I kept reminding myself about NMS and never did try Cyberpunk without first seeing reviews from real players… and holy fuck. Sounds like they’ve fixed a lot and the price has dropped, so I might dive in some day, but I definitely dodged a bullet with that one.
Just goes to show that NO company is worthy of your loyalty, regardless of their history.
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 …
They showcased a LOT of features that only existed in a demo version, stated plainly that they existed in the full game (as opposed to “this is something we WANT to add but right now it only works in the demo…”). Same in interviews: he went into great detail about features that didn’t exist.
NMS was like being advertised a brand new Lamborghini, charged for a brand new Lamborghini, then being given a 2003 Honda Civic.
That’s not something early access or beta would have fixed. Might have reduced the scale of community’s negative response simply by limiting the number of purple who would have bought it, but those who made the purchase and then realized they were scammed would have been just as upset.
Rather than labeling lackluster unfinished releases, these studios should stop setting impossible to achieve timelines, and just release a product when it’s ready. How they do it is for them to figure out
