Early access games: a positive step for the industry?

Thanks to the Steam sale, I was reviewing my game wishlist today and I had a realization: PC gamers have become inundated with early access alpha games. Perhaps it’s just the genres that I’m interested in, but on the building-stuff-in-space front I’ve got Space Engineers, StarForge, and Starbase DF-9, all early-access games. On the survival-with-monsters front, I’m interested in Rust, Nether, and of course I’ve already picked up DayZ.

The availability of Steam Greenlight and other avenues for releasing alpha and early beta games has really changed the tools available to developers over the past year or so. In combination with the rise of crowd-sourcing, early access channels have given developers quicker access to cash infusions, and gamers more hands-on time with the games they’re interested in.

Overall, I’d say this is a good thing, especially for smaller indie developers that don’t have the resources of the major studios. Digital Happiness (the Indonesian indie studio making DreadOut), for example, used Steam Greenlight and an indiegogo campaign to gauge interest in, raise the profile of, and raise money for the further development of its game. DayZ, which just released in early access last week, made more than $5 million in 24 hours that will help support the game’s further development. It’s great to see more money going to smaller studios and fan-driven projects like these.

At the same time, though, this new early access paradigm has some pitfalls both for developers and for gamers themselves. For developers, the main danger is that allowing fans to interact with the game and offer feedback before it’s finished can cloud your thinking and erode your focus and vision. Different people want different things, and if you’re getting feedback from 200,000 players at once saying they want all kinds of changes, it’s going to be tougher to stick to your original vision — even if that vision is going to produce a great game once everything is finished and polished.

Now your job isn’t just to make a great game, it’s to please all of these guys too.

The other issue for developers is that letting fans play your game early may scare them away or cause them to quit before the game is even released. It’s always pretty clear what “early access” means when you purchase these games, but at the end of the day, gamers are looking to have fun, and if they aren’t having fun in the alpha then they may not bother with the game when it’s actually released, even if all of the issues have since been fixed. DayZ may be an illustrative example here; thousands of people bought the game within 24 hours of its launch. But I wonder how many Asians and North Americans have played it since they realized that it’s almost always nighttime in the game during prime gaming hours in their time zones? That’s a temporary issue, of course. But it will drive gamers away nonetheless.

As gamers, the potential danger of the rise of early access games is that we’re being slowly made into quality assurance testers, except we’re paying the developers for the privilege! We’re performing a service for them now by testing the game, often mostly based on the promise of what the game will be like in the future. And we’re so early in this early access craze that it’s not really clear yet how many companies are going to actually deliver on those promises.

Of course, none of those worries have actually stopped me from purchasing early access games, and I plan to keep doing it. But what do you think? Is the ability to play exciting games early worth the potential risk that the game isn’t actually good?