Games

Took ages for factorio to release as well haha

Its why I think all the "Early access bad" people are fucking idiots.

A lot of games abuse EA, no arguments there. A lot of games also just rush to 1.0 so they can do a console release and then abandon the game (the Time at Portia devs did that with like three kickstarters?). And then you have the labors of love like Dwarf Fortress or Caves of Qud or Project Zomboid that basically will always be EA (although Qud hit 1.0, finally).

Not to mention studios like Amplitude who use EA in the best possible way. They have a vertical slice of the game and they work with the community to figure out what features to add or rebalance. It isn't always perfect but it genuinely feels like they are listening and it is great.

They just know that line going up steadily is more valuable than line going up exponentially until people get sick of your shit.

Sometimes the dev wants to push a bigger update and takes more than 3 months? Why full stop the sales? Just warn the people and let them decides.

This might happen if GabeN dies, because it is mostly him and his mentality that leads to consumer friendly decisions inside VALVe

being consumer friendly has brought them more money than any exploitative behaviour ever could have. Getting rid of that would be like butchering a goose that makes golden eggs just so you can get some extra money from the meat.

What's interesting to me about this and other features is that they all actually benefit Valve, as long as the EU/Australia require them to issue refunds upon request. Without refunds then these features are simply charity, but presently it's good business.

The cause of enshittification is essentially the shareholder pressure for endless and exponential growth that comes from public ownership.

Valve is a privately held company, and as long as it remains that way it doesn't have those perverse incentives.

Gabe will never allow Valve to go public as long as he is in control, but after he is gone who knows.

I think most of the games that would be in this position aren't willing or able to do that. It's not like there's a ton of income on stale half-released games with no active development, but people should be aware that's what they're looking at anyway.

I can always tell that a game has given up when their "updates" are all about what the community has built in the game, rather than what the developers have built.

Jokes on them, I got burned on a couple early access games in like 2012 or something so I quit buying early access. Wait for a release.

I feel like all that will happen is games will just release to 1.0 as “finished” when they clearly arent. It also may encourage rushing a game out thats a buggy mess.

Ive known some games to be very rough in early access that become absolutely gems a couple years later in development.

My only real counter to that is Project Zomboid. It's a complete game. It's in EA due to them wanting to add many more gameplay systems to the existing complete sandbox. They have a roadmap somewhere. They don't release major updates without multiple ones being added.

Last major update (41, a few years ago) was drivable cars (and all the spawning systems, loot, and map changes to make them fully fleshed out) and multiplayer. I'm sure there was more, but those were the standout things.

The new major update (42, available through a public opt-in beta branch right now) is a complete overhaul to gunplay, liquid management/mixing, crafting systems, lighting engine, and the addition of NPC animals with a full husbandry system. And that's only the highlights. It will stay in beta as they get better data for balancing the new features and the absurdly increased player count surfaces bugs they didn't find through internal testing. Once it's balanced and stable (maybe a year), they'll push this update to the main branch where it will continue to get minor bug fixes as things crop up (usually bugs surfaced by the modding community by the time it hits stable).

Then they'll keep crunching away on work on human NPCs and simulating story stuff with loot generation, which I believe will be the next major update in a few years.

Each intermediate release is a complete game, it just doesn't have the full set of features on the roadmap. It still is the best zombie survival sim on the market as is.

But it is absolutely a unicorn of early access.

My favorite game ever is noita and i played it for almost 3 years of early access plus the 4 years since release. I'm really happy i got to see this great game be worked on. Tbf i think the bulk of the game was pretty much fleshed out already and the devs just made things better and added new stuff.