So many people buying into early access titles do not realize how many games never get released regardless how much work was already put into them, and because of a lot more reasons than “we ran out of money”. Personal health of the main dev, disagreements within a dev team, financial issues, Real Live™ happening, hardware failure and data loss and so on can all stop a project before it can get a 1.0 release. Before early access, these titles simply never appeared on the market, preventing people getting burnt.
I think early access has helped to bring more projects to a final 1.0, but financing is just one part of the equation, and many gamers do not realize that. I only buy EA titles that are very obviously passion projects that have had regular and meaningful updates for a while and have a realistic roadmap that doesn’t suffer from feature creep. Everything else i am interested in, i simply wait - better to pay 10 bucks more for a finished project than 10 bucks less for something that never will get finished.
So many people buying into early access titles do not realize how many games never get released regardless how much work was already put into them, and because of a lot more reasons than “we ran out of money”. Personal health of the main dev, disagreements within a dev team, financial issues, Real Live™ happening, hardware failure and data loss and so on can all stop a project before it can get a 1.0 release. Before early access, these titles simply never appeared on the market, preventing people getting burnt.
I think early access has helped to bring more projects to a final 1.0, but financing is just one part of the equation, and many gamers do not realize that. I only buy EA titles that are very obviously passion projects that have had regular and meaningful updates for a while and have a realistic roadmap that doesn’t suffer from feature creep. Everything else i am interested in, i simply wait - better to pay 10 bucks more for a finished project than 10 bucks less for something that never will get finished.