Extra Credits: the problem with early acces

For those of you who don't know Extra Credits, it's a show largely directed at aspiring game developers to discuss issues from preproduction, to development and design decisions to marketing.

Their last episode was talking about some of the problems with regards to early access:


Personally I think it's an interesting take, bringing up a number of issues that are relevant for PA.

Such as the people who come in here, having freshly bought the game, and having vastly different expectations than the experience they have been presented.
Issues that go from a simple 'this game sucks', to 'we want shields' and more complex concerns about features, or lack thereof.
Now we, the 'die hard' try and allay those concerns, and often succeed in somewhat changing the perception of the person that came in. But for every person that comes in here to talk about this, there are ten more that just quietly put the game aside, never play it again, and if asked about it say they enjoy the experience it.

I'm not saying Uber isn't aware of these issues, I'm merely raising this as interesting point of discussion.

There definitely are lots of issues with Early Access.

The biggest issue with early access is idiots buying Early Access and expecting it to be a complete game.

PA's community is amazing though, so we're helping combat some of the issues. PA has a decent multiplayer experience, and has a thriving community with fan site, tutorials, gameplay videos, tournaments, and the like.

No arguments there

more bad news

That was a really good summary of a lot of the best arguments against Early Access. Uber seems to be discovering a lot of this the hard way but I do think they're aware of it. The comments in that video on community are very good points even for this game, but I think we're lucky here to be in a unique situation.

The core of the PA community had been around for about 15 years when the kickstarter was announced. We have added a lot of new community members since then but it did all start with the fans of the Annihilation games. I don't think Extra Credits is considering the possibility that a game can come around that is made for a specific group of fans by people that are also fans, and that's a really important thing to remember here.

We as community members can help prevent this from happening by doing more of what we have been doing already; keep supporting Uber through the good and the bad and encourage people that are unsure to wait until release before they buy the game. The high price of PA in Early Access was partly designed to keep out the people that weren't as serious about the game so that they wouldn't suffer from the burnout this video describes.

What, you didn't know that several temporal rifts were established by individuals as early as 1999 in order to fund PA's kickstarter campaign?

I only feel powerless and jealous for not having been then and there for I would have loved to be a part of this!

Total Annihilation was released in 1997 and the SupCom and Spring communities both grew directly out of that. Of course new people were added along the way but the point I was trying to make is that this game had a stronger community right from the start than most games could ever hope for.

Really, I don't see the problem with early access. For one, Brian said. So I like this early access so far, but you are saying it shouldn't be allowed because of a bunch of bad cookies? No matter how clear it warns the consumer?

For another, this game was either "early access or not made" since it was kickstarter. It was the only choice in that reguard.

For another, all THOSE problems are the same problems of poorly advertized games in general, there are TONS of released games, big rigs over the road racing, home, farcry 2
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkai...are-is-a-terrible-excuse-for-bad-video-games/

The REAL problem with This Game isn't early access, it is akin to being a game you actually have to research about, which isn't really something a brand new game can get around, and it is hard to force people to watch a demo of the game before buying, I mean anyone buying COULD do that but they DON'T.

So, tell me, is it Uber's fault for bothering to make a game that isn't an existing game clone? Or is it the player's fault for not watching a single in-game vid when thousands exist on youtube and a third a thousand on ZaphodX's alone, and then going to Metacritic and posting a 0 after not having seen any in-game video or reading up.

Uber may or may not make information available, they don't advertize at gamestop on live tv, but I know I and other forum guys post the same damn dribble every damn form of media:
1) The game is unfinished, it doesn't run full power yet. People complain they buy an unfinished game.
2) The game wil run 15 fps on a weak AND strong computer, it runs 15 fps from 8 games on 1 amazon server, it runs 15 fps PERIOD. When server is released, it will run faster on your stronger computer. It will likely run 30-60 fps. People complain it runs slow on their godlike computer... -.-
3) The game is missing some features or other features are barely running without sharpened content. Galactic War for instance. Planet Smashing can use more updating. Needs a few more units even. All of which is within reason. Yet people complain that Galactic War is very linear.
4) The game has player released serverside and offline mode, as well as server and client mods, however during beta the server is Uber-only and online-only, but great strides have been made in these areas. People STILL complain they thought it was offline only, and I am like lol no wait 4-5 months...

Yeah, I wish Valve would put a bit more effort into policing steam content. But then again, that's the drawback of something that's successful. The problems sometimes don't get enough attention.

Early Access can be great, it got me into PA and this community, the first one I participated in in the last ~5 years. And I think we all did a hella job in the last many months to keep this a happy and productive place, and retain a lot of very clever and good people.

The primary hole that needs to be fixed in Early Access in general is to get the, umm, I'll just call it "the Call of Duty crowd" to actually understand what is Early Access exactly. Just to get them in the right mindset. Which is you shouldn't buy Early Access games unless you want to jump in for the rollercoaster ride that is development and testing.

I'd even go as far as a different Steam storefront design, with big@$$ black and yellow stripes and hardhats. Much like a construction site.

It´s always going to be a double edged sword. I´m genuinely surprised we haven´t had the scam of the century yet. In time, i think it´s simply going to act as a subgenre of games as the kind of people who can stand up to the pressure and create a good game at the same time are rare. The old industry won´t (and can't) go away.

I think a lot of you are misapprehending me.

I NEVER sated early access shouldn't exists (in fact I'm in favour of early access. Although sadly steam doesn't do much in the way of vetting early access games, which leads to people being burned. Some of that is the fault of the consumer for not doing their research, but in those cases the devs are often largely sharing in that blame, as is steam).
Nor am I negative about the development of PA, it keeps progressing at a steady rate, new builds are regular enough, and constantly improve the game quite a bit.
And I'm positive the community is a VERY big part of that.

My intents with this post were/are varied. I think Extra Credits raises a lot of interesting points, and I want to see a discussion about how the content of that vid applies to PA early access. (obviously some things just don't apply to this situation). Additionally I wanted to raise awareness as to what could prove to be an issue, and how we as the community could help to mitigate those issues.

I migitate those issues by raising good arguements. This game isn't a "problem child" of early access. It is a good canidate of early access. It definitely is farther along. It is definitely a lot lower risk than it/others are/were in kickstarter. It is lower or equal risk as other steam games. I think it is significantly farther along than Starbound or Star Citizen as far as how close release is.

Honestly, I stopped listening to Extra Credits when they pretty much said fun games are illegitimizing games as an artform.

I think I saw that. I remember seeing something of theirs that made me think "NOPE" and toss them straight out the window.

Although I can honestly say I've disagreed with a lot of the things EC have said in the past, this video brings up a lot of legitimate worrying points, especially regarding the games community.

The forum seems less active than it has been, at least for things I find interesting. I've noticed that a lot of people joined The Realm so maybe the activity has split off site.

I don't think its a case of users splitting off. I think it has a lot more to do with the stage of development with PA.

Back in alpha/beta days, a lot of the post were talking about how things should be done and what would be fun. Things like orbital, shields, radar, megabots ect... Now people know the direction Uber has chosen and all that's left to do is wait.