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.