Early Access: The Death of the Release Date
Originally published September, 2017Welcome back, once again, to another piece in my multi-post rambling series on video game release dates. In the initial article, I quickly discussed how the nature of a release date has always been a little loose in the video game industry in a short look at the history of home releases. Next, I talked about a particular game genre that has always been at the forefront of the idea that a video game is never truly finished, as well as my personal experience with how that thinking can backfire. Today, I've got a subject for you that, frankly, I've been wanting to talk about for a while.
What is Early Access?
I'm not sure precisely when this started, but I know that Early Access became a common scenario for video games within the past 7 years. It partially had to do with an increase in players wanting to play games while they were still in Alpha or Beta. I never cared much myself to play a version of the game so unfinished that I was essentially acting the part of a QA tester and experiencing bugs everywhere, but there were a ton of people who just wanted to get a chance to try out games as early as possible. Publishers caught on to this trend and began releasing betas of their games to have the general public test, provide feedback, and give developers an idea of the number of people who would be playing their games at launch. Betas and their transformation into a "benefit" to players are a whole other subject, but the point I'm making her is: they were the "early access" of their day. A few years later, crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter changed the game, yet again. Suddenly, betas and whatever form of early access to an unfinished video game didn't have to be simply a free demo. It could be something players could pay for.
Note the difference in this Early Access tag and the one that Fortnite has on the Playstation store; see image at bottom.
Steam, the PC marketplace with the most money, seemed to coin the term "early access" and was one of the first places that I recall using the concept so readily. It's still a relatively new concept, since some marketplaces on consoles don't yet identify those products in a way that's very clear. However, it's one of the simpler concepts to explain: You pay the same price you would pay for the finished product with the expectation that your money will help fund the development of the game, which grants you access to the game early; you can play it as it is updated all the way up to and past the final release date. Sometimes, like it is on Kickstarter, the developer will advertise special rewards for people who fund the game in early access. If it sounds a little shady, there are plenty of examples in which you're right.
A large majority of the games on Steam that are in early access will never be released. It's rare for one of them to ever be completed and much more common for the con-artist developers to take money from the investors and disappear, or for the project to get cancelled because the funds were mismanaged. There's no real refund process for early access, and unlike being an investor or executive producer, you don't really get a say in the development of a game. You can leave a comment or troll the game forums with your own armchair development ideas, but that's it. You are just giving your money to a stranger, hoping that your small contribution will help them further improve their product until it is finally available, and, as a reward, you get to play their unfinished product in the meantime.
If you're thinking, "this sounds super sketchy; why would anyone contribute to an early access game?" there are still some success stories in which the early funding helped produce a great game. Darkest Dungeon was one of the best games that was in early access for a while and was eventually released. A fair amount of the game was done before it was accessible, so what early-access contributors like myself got to play was still a game that worked, was fun, and wasn't going to change too drastically over time. When it was finally released, the finished product was still very similar to its early access form, just with some new characters, dungeons, and mechanics changes.
Sunless Sea was another game to come out of early access and succeed upon final release. It went through some bigger changes than Darkest Dungeon in terms of the mechanics, with completely different ways in which the combat would be controlled. However, like Darkest Dungeon, it was still a small indie game that may not have been completed had contributions from the public not been allowed to fund it during its development.
Then there's the big indie elephant in the room, Player Unknown's: Battlegrounds (aka PUBg). At the time of this article's publication, PUBg is still in early access. However, it is now the most popular game on Steam and has "sold" over 5 million digital copies. The game is not even done yet and may not be finished until next year, but it has become the most popular and successful game of 2017. With a game that has been so successful and widely accepted in its current state, what does it mean for it to be "done"? They'll never get rid of every bug or balance the game's combat to perfection. They've also managed to hit a wide enough market that a release date doesn't even matter. People may not be talking about PUBg in 2018 like they are this year, yet that may be the year in which it is actually released. At this point, the funding from early access doesn't matter anymore, because the developer's have gotten all the funding they will ever need to complete the game. All they have to do is slap a date on it and call it "done," then continue with post-release patches.
And that's the thing. Even when the game is "done" it's still never done. You have the pre-release patches, aka the development of a game. You also have post-release patches. Essentially, there is no such thing as a finished game anymore. The only time a game is "done" is when the developer stops working on it altogether and abandons it. It made sense for games to still have release dates and post-release patches because it allowed developers to see what the public has to say and make the necessary adjustments they may not have thought to do during development—not to mention, marketing is utterly dependent on having a day they can point to in order to properly advertise a product. Sometimes it's tough to catch every flaw when you're deeply embedded in your projects, so it makes sense to be able to go back and fix the problems after you've made it available to the public. But what if you let the public in while development is happening? Is there any reason to have post-release updates? What are you saying when you say a game is "released"? The public already has it, at what point do they judge a game without the disclaimer "it's unfinished"?
These sort of questions are what I think of when I look at games like PUBg, or No Man's Sky, or Fortnite (which we'll get to in a second). In the past, when a game was done, we could be far more critical of it and say whether or not it met our expectations or accomplished what it set out to do. Now that there is no real end point for a game's development, it's become much more complicated. PUBg is the ultimate success story when it comes to benefiting from early access. It's a broken mess of a game that is still mostly fun and wildly popular. No Man's Sky is on the opposite side of this, because it is a case in which it would have benefited from just being labeled as "early access."
Think about it. No Man's Sky had mountains of expectations to overcome, because the public was building them up and up before they could play it. The marketing, the public appearances, and the speculation from the fans were creating an image of the game that might have been what the developers wanted to achieve eventually, but since they had a release date, they weren't able to do everything they wanted in time. Since its release, they've changed the game and added a lot of mechanics. Had the "release date" been changed to the "early access availability date" think of how much different everyone would have been towards it. There might still have been disappointment, but consider how much benefit of the doubt No Man's Sky would have gotten instead of ire. If you knew it wasn't done, and the developers kept talking about what they're still going to put into it, would it have done much better if its "release date" was this year? The version players bought last year and hated was an early access game; these post-release patches have finally brought the product up to a more widely accepted state of "finished," and the developers can continue to further improve it going forward. Once again, I genuinely believe the messaging is what killed that game and the developers have had to work extremely hard at trying to get the public back on board with it, when they should have either just called it "early access" last year or waited until this year to "release" it.
Speaking of messaging problems...
Fortnite's Faux Pas
Before I close out this lengthy rambling article about release dates, and stuff that is mostly irrelevant, I want to talk about Fortnite. Fortnite is a multiplayer blend of Minecraft and tower-defense made by Epic Games, the creators of Gears of War. It's also a game that has been in development for over 6 years, which is a very long time for a video game's development. After going quiet for a couple years and assumed cancelled by most, Fortnite is out there and available for players. However, it's still not finished.
Now the fact that a game that has had such a long development is releasing in early access is no big deal. Plenty of other games have done it, why not this one? Well, there's some weird, shady things surrounding this game and how it has come to exist in early access. For one thing, the game is not "downloadable only." All other games that have come out in early access were only available on platforms like Steam, where the method of obtaining the unfinished game was via download. If the game finally hit a real release date, the developers might create a physical copy for stores, but most often they would stay digital only. Not Fortnite. With my own eyes, I have seen Fortnite for sale, in a box, on a shelf, at a Target by my home. Strange as this is, the real sketchiness about selling an unfinished game like Fortnite comes from two things:
It doesn't clearly say that it is currently unfinished in some of the places in which you are buying the game, such as a retailer like Target or the Playstation Store. See image below.
It is a free-to-play game.
First of all, if you're going to sell an unfinished game to people, it should be clearly advertised as such. I would be pretty miffed if I had paid 30-60 bucks for something only to find out that its incomplete when I turn it on and can't access half of the content. To their credit, the game's store page on PSN says its in an "Early Access season," but doesn't define what that means. They're assuming that all people on Playstation consoles will understand the terminology because, of course, they would all be familiar with the idea by now. Also to the game's credit, it states it's currently in early access during load screens and on menus, but that's still too late. Tell me clearly what I'm in for before I buy the game. Steam at least puts a big blue banner above the game's description on their store pages, with a definition of what "early access" means to make sure you're aware that the game is incomplete and may never be finished.
The fact that Fortnite is a free-to-play game is what makes this whole scenario so bizarre and gross. Free-to-play means that you don't pay to play the game, you just pay for the small things that make up the content. Yet, Epic Games is selling a retail version of this unfinished game for money. It seems like what a person purchases will function like other free-to-play models in that, when it's released, people who have paid to initial fee will get something of a "founder's pack." This pack will likely have a bunch of stuff that would cost more money post-release to make the early buy-in worth it, but it's still weird, especially since that fact that a store page might say it's free, but then the description says that a founder's pack is required... (that means it's not free). Early access was already a strange concept for consumer purchases, and now Fortnite has made it even stranger buy selling a game early that shouldn't actually be sold because it's supposed to be free.
It says "early access season" what does that mean? At least Steam explains what "Early Access" is.
Why not wait till it's done? It's not like Epic Games is hurting for money since they also have made the Unreal Engine 4, the most widely used game development engine of the current generation, other than Unity. Epic is constantly getting money for their engine, and while Fortnite may have been a money sink for the past few years, I doubt they were desperate enough for cash that they pushed it out early to make up for it. If anything, Fortnite was probably one of those decisions made to appeal to investors. A game that's been in development forever doesn't look very good on paper, especially when so much money has been sunk into it. By putting this game out that may never been finished, Epic has the chance to make some of the money back. By putting it out in its state, they have the opportunity to possibly finish it, but since it was released on stores without advertising the fact that it is unfinished, or that it's price of admission is misleading, it appears "done" on paper and Epic can put another checkmark in their portfolio for investors.
The whole thing is weird and gross. I've never been the most comfortable with early access as a concept, because there's no recourse for the consumer if the game is never completed. However, I understood why small game developers might make use of it or need it to continue making their games. It did, after all, result in some of my favorite games of the past few years. That being said, big-name developers, who are not as scrappy or in the same financial dire straits of an indie developer, have also shown how shady the whole thing can get and how much it can all backfire. Hello Games is not as big as Epic Games or Capcom, but they suffered greatly for releasing No Man's Sky in early access without telling anyone. Having witnessed the crashing and burning of different games that underdelivered over the years, I've learned that I'm better off waiting. I'm usually pretty late to the party when it comes playing video games because I wait for the price to drop. With how the nature of release dates have changed, I'm more likely to have a better experience with the game after several weeks of patches have made their way through as well. If there's one message I have to take away from this whole tirade of rambling, it's that you should take your time and wait to buy a game; you're much more likely to enjoy the product after some time has passed and it's actually closer to "finished."
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! I've written other random rambling posts that you can access via the category menus. If you found this article first and want to go back to see the earlier pieces click Part 1 & Part 2.
If you want to read my initial thoughts on the No Man's Sky debacle of last year, click these entries:
Let me know what you thought of these lengthy monologues in the comments. Did I miss something or was I wrong? Tell me your own personal experiences with this stuff!
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