Quote:
Originally Posted by nilodor
It's not so bad because a lot of the offers seem to be coming in with lower prices than normal retail. Once early access and kickstarting start to get to full retail prices then it'll be like when movies starting putting commercials in before screenings.
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There's probably a fancy economics term for that behavior, but I think of it as the Food Truck Effect. When the food trucks first hit it big here, a big part of the attraction was based on the low cost relative to going to a restaurant....but then once food trucks settled into the culture they all raised their prices to restaurant levels, then restaurants raised their prices in response, the food trucks followed suit again, and now you're going to pay $10 for a hamburger, regardless of whether you want to eat it a table, or in a parking lot.
Early Access in particular seems to give developers a bit too much of a crutch, where they can essentially release a product that is expected to be buggy and unplayable, and then charge folks to test it for them. On the one hand, I love the idea of making it easier for indie developers and projects to get off the ground, but it seems like plenty of less-than-needy studios have used it simply as a way to monetize the testing phase of development, at the cost of their customers.
If that resulted in games generally being much more robust and higher quality upon release I might have a better view of the process, but that doesn't necessarily seem to be the case, as of yet. Likewise my personal experiences with early access stuff has always been disappointing because my attention span is short and limited, and playing 3/4 of a game for weeks/months effectively kills my interest in the game by the time it gets a full release, despite the fact the developer and I both expect the opposite at time of purchase.