this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
81 points (97.6% liked)
Games
32443 readers
1131 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, it looks like these days it's more of a way for a developer to state that they intend to make changes in more drastic and sudden ways than what you would expect from a normal release (and also a way to benefit from the exposure of two launch events I guess). It's just that some of these types of releases in the past were launched more as a way to test the waters for concepts that were abandoned when they didn't find early success so I'm still a bit weary from those days.
A more cynical person would argue that the quality of most high-production releases at this point qualify as "early-access" anyway. But I'm definitely not that jaded, no sir.
You're absolutely right, which is exactly why it's just a marketing term now (imo). There's amazing games that stay in early access for years and years with near monthly content updates, but at the same time, some early access games are complete garbage and the devs never intend to complete the game. They leave it as ea to sell copies to people who hope it will one day get better.... But never does.
Sometimes it's obvious it's abandonware that hasn't had an update in two years, but sometimes not so obvious.