this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Awesome! I've been excited for this game for a while now, glad to see it finally get a date. I might have to break my no-early-access rule for this one.
Early Access is just a marketing strategy these days anyway. I have a couple of games in my library that have been "early access" for nearly a decade. For all intents and purposes, the games are complete, but the devs just keep adding new features. Outside of the major AAA companies, games these days seem to just be ever-evolving, so long as sales are enough to keep the dev interested in adding new features.
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.