Hot take: Buying an early-access game because you assume it’ll be a lot better down the road is just silly. Just because no man’s sky did a full 180 and made an awesome game from a shaky launch doesn’t mean any other E-A game will follow the same trajectory.
If you’re not happy with the feature set it has when you buy it, and you’re not OK with the developer potentially dropping the title immediately, you probably shouldn’t have bought it.
The NMS comparison is confusing. NMS didn’t have an early access release. It just released and received substantial updates.
Perhaps Valheim is a better comparison?
I feel like I got my money’s worth out of it, and I still continue to enjoy it, but plenty of people are really salty about the rate at which it’s being finished. And understandably so; it’s been years since it entered early access.
I haven’t played the latest biome, I got sick of waiting 1+ year for each one and gave up on the game.
he’s calling for a specific rate of new expansions to keep players coming back, not crunching for “endless” growth
This annoys me. It’s pure semantics.
To be fair, his argument seems to be more about maintaining a pace of development as an openly unfinished early access game who already has paying customers.
I’m still on the side of the other guy, who can’t control that fact that a game that he listed as unfinished as a solo dev/small team blew up too early. I think that for a small team trying to build something that’s not tiny, having continuous feedback from a dedicated group of customers allows you to make a better game, and having income allows you to spend more time developing it.
I would generally not recommend buying an early access game unless you either think it’s already at a level you’re happy with or you really value that back and forth process and want to “invest” in helping the game you value get made. You need to do it with your eyes open. But I don’t think it’s an inherent failing to not magically build a studio when a game blows up.
