Why the fuck does this exist?

Because impatient autistic fucks can't learn how to wait and dish out money just so they can play it right away.

You can thank them for letting this become a cancerous marketing meta.

The earliest game I remember doing tha, but not on steam, was minecraft. Seems the EA craze picked up speed after it was a massive success.

Some are good.

List of good ones I've played;

>Battlerite
>insurgency
>table top sim

I'm sure most are shit but I'm pretty choice in my purchases

pretty much this

I'm not sure what's worse, that, or KF2's cash shop while it's still in EA.

To add to this, I remember,

>prison architect
>factorio

Tell me about clock work empires

Is it in development hell? 2 years in early access ?

Squad is making good progress too.

it's good for developers, shit for consumers

but it's good that it exists, because that way we get more games from new developers and stupid idiot consumers get ripped off

I tried playing it but it didn't run athe 60fps 1080p on medium to high gfx with a 970 / i7 so I refunded, is it more optimized now ?

There are plenty of Early access games that are great:

Distance
Speedrunners

and ill be releasing my next game on early access next year

I've been waiting for Clockwork Empires to be done, but the devs were good about supporting their previous game for a longass time. Dredmor got like three expansions and what they're doing for Clockwork Empires seems a hell of a lot more ambitious than a simple roguelike. Here's hoping it's not shit.

>Make a game
>Run out money someway through it
>Put it out for money to finish it
I assume that's what it's meant to be used for, but most will just throw it out for more money, quicker. Then you have shit like this which i can't believe isn't getting called out by fans.

Consolecucks are still this mad

>Paying to beta test a game.

It's fucking mind-blowing that people are buying it and not eating them alive for releasing DLC for an """early access""" title.

I enjoy playing broken, buggy, and unbalanced games.

It's funny.

Oh, it's dungeons of dredmore devs? Shit, I'm sold. Loved that game

I'm okay with watching Jim Sterling play them

...

It's been in Early Access for two years and frankly, it's amazing how much the game has improved.
Early versions were borderline unplayable, the UI was absolutely horrible and ther wasn't even a damn minimap.
They keep rolling out new versions every month and one or two experimental versions inbetween those. The last main version had an overhaul to the mine system, for example. That being said I'm really uncertain about what they did in the last experimental update, what with locking loadouts to randomly generated areas.
You could get it since it's somewhat fun of a game already, but do keep in mind it is still unfinished.
Oh, also your saves will likely break every time there's a new update, so keep that in mind.
Kind of sad pipelines are unlikely to be implemented, since the concept art from back when it was still codenamed Project Odin was cool, but oh well

As long as it's still supported. Devs aren't going poor any time soon and just releasing as is, I hope

The good ones end up on PS4, don't worry. Even some of the shit ones do!

That's why I like them. They make good youtube videos.

When I first saw "early access" my immediate response was "nobody could possibly be this dumb". I was very wrong. Now because of this and Greenlight I have to wade through oceans of shit while browsing steam games.

Steam needs some fuckin quality control.

I think EA is a good idea, but the problem exists on both sides.
>Developers
You have alright ones such as Notch where he gets away with vacations since it was 5 euros then slowly rose the price up until release. Ignoring his vacations, it's probably the fairest model you can come up with. Early adopters get to try your piece of shit and spread the word as it slowly grows into something fun.

Or perhaps Toxikk that nobody knows about and it's a solid game. They delivered what they said they were going to do according to their schedule. Unfortunately it has a poor userbase so it's basically dead. This is what EA was supposed to be. Lay out a plan, follow it, and deliver while receiving feedback from the community.

On the other side of things you have retards making their first game or someshit. Basically every zombie/alien survival game. They all fail to deliver, don't understand programming+design, and they're all slow as fuck in development. It's okay though! It's early access :^) deal with it. Appalling.

>Users
Oh god everybody is retarded. EA isn't a final product that nobody ever seems to understand. Example of this would be Starbound when it first came out. It had a clear notice saying shit may go bad and savings can get corrupted. Everybody bitched when their save was destroyed, which is semi-reasonable due to the incompetence of the devs, but it was clearly stated. Now for some reason Starbound is regarded so highly for how good they did in EA.. when they basically did nothing for 2 years, but that's not the users so w/e.

It's just overall it doesn't work well when there isn't a strict policy they have to follow. Everybody is retarded and it's really disappointing.

Isn't that just another word for closed/open beta/alpha

>We'll buy a giant dinosaur statue
>We'll make shirts
>We'll pose for pictures

>But we will never, EVER fix the lag.

The only Early Access zombie game that has had any hint of progress is Unturned.

one kid is doing it for fun and he's still active with listening to his community suggestions

No it can be pre alpha as well

This game looks ballin'
store.steampowered.com/app/233610/

>Then
Oh jeez I better make sure everyone can play our game and that there's no game breaking bugs that we might not have caught, better hire some play testers and make sure to credit them at the end of the game.

>Now
You want to play this game before everyone else? better pay up! Oh we might put in all this extra effort to polish and add some new things that we meant to, but we already got all the sales that we expected, so we're releasing tomorrow. Make sure to tell your friends to buy a copy!
Oh and don't expect any recognition or even acknowledgement for finding any bugs throughout the whole process.

I love to hate Early Access. It's still a shitload better than Kickstarter.

I hate the creeping increases in prices for EA games, and I'm passing over more and more of them for breaking the $20 line. I will not buy an Early Access game for over $20. I'm also very unlikely to buy any Early Access games that also raised money via Kickstarter. Never trust devs who already blew through one pile of money and come begging to Steam for more.

If Valve would cap EA game prices at $14.99 I think the market for them would improve instantly. Though, in general Steam needs a much more robust search and filtering system. I'd like to never see another game on Steam with a regular (non-sale) price of $4.99 or less.

Project Zomboid?

It's absolutely awful for both customers and devs. It causes games to reach the peak of their popularity in their most incomplete state and fade into irrelevance as they (maybe) get better. You only get one launch and early access is the worst way to do it.

Cause PC gamers just love their unfinished sandbox crafting survival zombie first person multiplayer games.

Early Access is part of the startup culture that is indie culture now
It allows anyone to pitch any game to all the customers

Darkest Dungeon went from kikestarter to Early Access. But they already stated that on their original kikestarter page iirc. The backer packages included alpha access via steam. And the game was actually quite enjoyable, I donated $15 and got more than 60 hours out of it

Prison Architect, Factorio and Rimworld are alright.

>EA isn't a final product that nobody ever seems to understand.

No, fuck you. This is how and why devs get away with posting awful shit in Early Access and letting it wallow in EA hell forever.

If you're selling a completely worthless piece of shit in EA, you need to get shit on for it. And with ever increasing EA prices, the standards for worthless piece of shit should be inverse to the price.

Besieged for $5.99/6.99, fucking brilliant. There plenty to complain about, especially at launch, but fuck it, it's $5.99

Wreckfest for $39.99? Fuck them. It's almost two years overdue, spend over a year without any visible changes. The game is totally different than what was initially promised, and has taken as long to develop as the entire FlatOut Franchise that Bugbear made and it's still nowhere near completion.

t. """""''"cinematic""""""" experience pro

Did Factorio devs have anything to do with Spacechem? Because the games sound very similar conceptually.

Throwing memes at me doesn't stop the cold hard erect truth from cumming out you fucking faggot.

no.
spacechem was by the guy who made Infiniminer and he works at valve now I think

factorio's made in the czech republic

>pc master race praise le gaben

>throw memes around
>complain when you get memes back
Ebin :')

What I "threw around" wasn't a meme it was FACT something a stupid newfag like you is clearly too god damn retarded to understand. Also I didn't even give you permission to reply to me mother fucker so you better watch the fuck out before I get real ticked and bash yer fuckin skull in cause I'm in no mood for tomfoolery tonight. FUCK OFF!

It's not my most defensible position. I hate Kickstarter beyond all reason, so I'm instantly skeptical of anything that already raised Kickstarter money that still comes out asking for more development money. That said, I readily buy EA games all the time, so long as they're reasonably priced.

Just at the moment I'm playing with Besieged, Last Leviathan, From the Depths, and I've recently reinstalled to check the progress on The Forest, Stranded Deep, Space Engineers, and Sub Nautica. I've already enjoyed any one of those more than Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition (which to be fair, I only paid $7.49 for).

Giving early access to Kickstarter backers is cool. Selling early access on Steam because you ran out of money is bullshit. And any developer that says they're not in EA to raise funds in a lying sack of shit who should be fucked in the mouth with a shotgun while it's being fired repeatedly.

So that wonderful things like CrossCode can exist.

Is it worth it for all the garbage that also is early access on Steam? Well, it depends on the day. I say yes.

Early Access is a fundamentally flawed concept because it goes against the basic idea of bartering. Once you pay full price for an unfinished product the seller no longer has any motivation or reason to finish the product other than goodwill.

>other than goodwill.
but user, surely all humans are fundamentally good inside and would not desire to exploit the naive masses, right?

To scam retards and make e-celebs richer. Since its inception, there have probably been a total of 5 games on Early Access that actually released and added content to signify that there was progression. The rest are games that have been in EA for years and years with no release date in sight and no new content. But it's okay, because it's only an alpha, right?

This would be 100% accurate if they could only sell it once to a single person, but as it stands in a world where Notch was paid for more for Minecraft than it could ever earn, and that was after earning millions and millions from it, the motivation should be obvious.

Everyone wants to have the EA hit on their hands.

Plenty of shady bitches are out there, some on purpose and some on accident (Bugbear is both of these), but I usually find it's incompetence rather than malice that leaves a game in EA hell.

First rule of EA game buying is to expect nothing more to ever be developed than what you're buying at that moment.

The gross hyperbole doesn't really make the case. How many outright Early Access scams can you actually name? I can think of two, and one of those is the subject of debate. Wreckfest, which even if it's ever completed at this point will have been a miserable piece of shit failure. That was put out by a well-known developer with a string of successful game launches and 100+ million dollar franchise in it's history.

Because people pay for it.

The basic idea behind it wasn't too bad, it gives tiny/small dev teams a steady flow of income to keep developing it and thus enables them to work on it to begin with.

But as everything in life, it got abused by greedy cunts to the point where it would be better to just abolish it again.

>devs start asking money for unfinished games
>people pay for it
>devs who already got KS money admit they're not done and ask for more
>people pay for it
>Don't Starve had "early access DLC"
>people pay for it
>Ark had DLC for a base game still in early access
>people pay for it

Just where does it end?

It doesn't. It's the slippery slope, you push through one thing that is just below the pain threshold, wait till people got so used to seeing it that it is perceived as something normal and then you go for the next thing.

I don't see how having a low price allows them to publish a bad product.

You're also misunderstanding what I was trying to say. I wasn't trying to say to release a piece of shit product and everyone has to deal with it since it's EA. Not at all. I'm simply saying that it doesn't represent the final product, but you better be showing off something to the users that can interact with that is mostly issue free. Again TOXIKK as an example.
>Hey guys this is our roadmap and we'll deliver around these dates
Though this is easier for them since it is a fps game where they can cut up the game's content from basic small maps with some guns to many guns and big maps with vehicles. It had issues, but they were addressed in the future.

Alternatively you can look at Project CARS. Although not EA, but the same thing. They have a roadmap, deliver, iterate, and fix shit. But ignore the project cars 2 being sold when 1 was out. First alpha and release are vastly different. It didn't represent the final product other than the core concept, which wasn't hard to decipher.

We have different interpretations of the word "scam". Any game that has been in EA for longer than a year is a scam. Full stop. If you need over a year, then there is literally no reason you should be expecting people to fucking purchase it. EA allows shitty devs to make a partially complete game and call it a day, never giving people the game they were promised. But it's apparently okay because Steam tells you that you are playing unfinished shit. There are a few game where the devs actually seem to be listening to feedback and adding content, which is the intent, but those cases seem few and far between. Instead of you get shitty devs who cut and run.

For the first point you have the problem that the devs want the amximum profit. You don't get the maximum profit if you adjust the price to the increasing quality of the game.

For the second point, I don't think that is really a problem anymore since nowadays Steam shows the "recent ratings" thing. So if you fix all the things which made a lot of people flip their shit your rating will improve

You guys have to understand something

For any given population, half of them have below average intelligence

They're the primary market for these things

Yeah, you're covering everything that's ever come out of early access and actually been a huge commercial success as a scam then. Don't Starve and Don't Starve Together are brilliant. Spent some time in EA, but came out nice. So did Kerbal. The Escapists came out of EA quickly. Without a single noticeable change, and it's a gamemaker piece of shit that sold on JackIrishFag and over youtuber bullshit hype.

I see Early access as an inverted Kickstarter. You put in enough effort to make a game-like substance to amuse me, you price it reasonably for what it is at the time, and I'll buy it so you can support yourself while you try to finish the project and attempt to earn that Mojang money.

I never expect to get more. Shit, I lack the attention span to follow development. I'll play their game, get bored with the current content and move on. Maybe I'll check back later. The Forest and Stranded Deep have been especially cool coming back after a long while.

I was sure Stranded Deep was a dead POS when I last uninstalled it, but it has moved along. It's still an EA failure, but It was a pretty limited concept in the first place. For my $14.99, I've played about 11 hours. Having played it at the beginning and coming back now, I can see it's changed an impressive amount (though not relative to the time it's taken).

And the above may help answer our misunderstanding too.

Piece of shit product is a relative. Any utterly broken unplayable mess is obviously unacceptable.

But a tiny amount of content and some significant optimization issues are quite acceptable for a $5.99 EA game which has actually consistently, if not rapidly, improved and added content, optimization and graphic improvements since it's release. (Besieged)

Now if you had Besieged (as it launched, or even today with all it's updates) and you charged $39.99 for it, you'd rightly deserved to be mocked, and shit on EA or not. Wreckfest is that mess.