Should Steam restrict which studios are allowed to launch a game in Early Access?

[Zed Clampet]

The harsh truth is that most games on Steam don't sell well enough in those crucial first 30 days to merit further development. This creates a bad situation when the developer launched a partial game as Early Access. The people who paid for the game expect the game to be finished no matter the sales figures, but that obviously isn't going to happen. In these situations, some publishers, like Playway, just switch the game to 1.0 and pretend that it is finished. This isn't a good solution, but the main alternative is to leave it in Early Access. This is also a terrible idea. They should just pull the plug and remove it from sale.

Basically, it's a mess that I think Valve needs to fix. They've done this with pre-sales, as only certain developers are allowed to use this feature, and I think something similar needs to happen with Early Access. You shouldn't be able to launch a game into Early Access without a track record of success (this rules out Playway).

Your thoughts appreciated...

 

[Pifanjr]

Yes, I think that if a studio abuses the Early Access system to get money for unfinished games and then never follows through on their promises for the finished product they should be banned from releasing into Early Access.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Yes, I think that if a studio abuses the Early Access system to get money for unfinished games and then never follows through on their promises for the finished product they should be banned from releasing into Early Access.

Just went down the rabbit hole and discovered that the most mismanaged EA game I've ever owned has been removed from sale on Steam, but can still be bought on the Epic store and comes complete with a fake user review score of 3.9. To make sure we're on the same page, this is a game where walking down a hill damages you repeatedly with fall damage, and if you run down the hill instead of walk, you'll either just die of fall damage outright or something even worse will happen to you: your suit will get a hole in it and you'll have broken legs. The ingredients to fix your suit are extremely rare and nowhere near the starting area, so you are going to slowly die. But even that's not the worst of it. If you had the game set on Easy, you can't die. Now you have a hole in your suit and you are walking at a crawl's pace because you broke your legs going down the hill, the screen is flashing red because of your health, and you can barely see anything because there are giant cracks across the screen to represent that your suit is breached. It will probably be about a 2 hour (real life) walk at your current pace to find the materials you need to fix your suit. At this point you probably try to change your difficulty option and realize you can't. In desperation, you hobble over to your chest to see if you have the right flower, by accident, to craft splints for your legs. You open the chest (you have no idea where in the world this flower is found) and discover that the game doesn't save what you put into chests, so there's nothing there.

 

[neogunhero]

I bet it would be a very hard thing to police but there should be some restrictions.

Maybe developers/publishers should be given a strike system, but there so much nuance to that. They can get a strike if they don’t update their game for a long time, but what if it’s a one-man team and life emergencies come up that don’t allow them to update the game for so long? They can get a strike by leaving early access and pushing 1.0, but who’s to say some people won’t enjoy it while others can clearly see the issues? The hard part is trusting Steam’s judgement when it comes to stuff like that.

Maybe an easier, somewhat temporary solution would be to just increase the fee to get your game listed. I think the fee is $100, perhaps it can be raised to $500 or even $1000, just to raise the bar of entry. It may not be the most effective solution, but it could help reduce the amount of cash grab shovelware coming into Steam daily, and makes independent developers think hard if they are ready to release it to the public. Perhaps increase Valve’s percentage cut for EA games as well, with a recoupable amount if it hits 1.0.

Steam could also watch game reviews and have a system that flags a game for manual review if it receives too many negative reviews in a certain amount of time. This of course won’t help the countless amount of games that get under 100 reviews a year, sometimes even less.

There could also be a player report button. You can already report games if they violate TOS and such, but maybe a new report button that lets players report it as being abandoned or whatnot. Then Steam can manually review it and see if it needs to be taken down or not.

Again there is just so much nuance and different possibilities around this that it would be hard to come up with a completely effective system. I think raising the fee would be a good start at least. AAA pubs only need to pay $100 to list their game which is a nothing but a drop in the bucket to them, but to smaller genuine developers that’s a bit more money. Increase that, and those developers will be more serious about getting their game out into 1.0 than abandon it.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I bet it would be a very hard thing to police but there should be some restrictions.

Maybe developers/publishers should be given a strike system, but there so much nuance to that. They can get a strike if they don’t update their game for a long time, but what if it’s a one-man team and life emergencies come up that don’t allow them to update the game for so long? They can get a strike by leaving early access and pushing 1.0, but who’s to say some people won’t enjoy it while others can clearly see the issues? The hard part is trusting Steam’s judgement when it comes to stuff like that.

Maybe an easier, somewhat temporary solution would be to just increase the fee to get your game listed. I think the fee is $100, perhaps it can be raised to $500 or even $1000, just to raise the bar of entry. It may not be the most effective solution, but it could help reduce the amount of cash grab shovelware coming into Steam daily, and makes independent developers think hard if they are ready to release it to the public. Perhaps increase Valve’s percentage cut for EA games as well, with a recoupable amount if it hits 1.0.

Steam could also watch game reviews and have a system that flags a game for manual review if it receives too many negative reviews in a certain amount of time. This of course won’t help the countless amount of games that get under 100 reviews a year, sometimes even less.

There could also be a player report button. You can already report games if they violate TOS and such, but maybe a new report button that lets players report it as being abandoned or whatnot. Then Steam can manually review it and see if it needs to be taken down or not.

Again there is just so much nuance and different possibilities around this that it would be hard to come up with a completely effective system. I think raising the fee would be a good start at least. AAA pubs only need to pay $100 to list their game which is a nothing but a drop in the bucket to them, but to smaller genuine developers that’s a bit more money. Increase that, and those developers will be more serious about getting their game out into 1.0 than abandon it.

The problem I have with it being available to everyone until they abuse it is that I'm not sure how Steam would track them if they changed their name/contact info.

 

[Zimbaly]

Early access should be be free. Basically you're paying to test a game, when people use to have jobs doing that.
Also how many games go EA and never come out, but take your money and you get no refund, yet Steam still makes money off selling trash or what's clearly a way to make money with no product. Would be considered a scam back in the day.

Speaking of trash. 90 percent of the games need to be taken off Steam. What was once a decent platform is nothing more then a used kleenex on the ground of a subway that's been flooded by a swamp.

 

[Pifanjr]

Early access should be be free. Basically you're paying to test a game, when people use to have jobs doing that.

I don't quite get why people are willing to pay for an unfinished game, but if people are willing to pay for it then I see no problem with developers taking their money.

Also how many games go EA and never come out, but take your money and you get no refund, yet Steam still makes money off selling trash or what's clearly a way to make money with no product. Would be considered a scam back in the day.

Steam has a disclaimer as one of the first things you see on an Early Access title stating that you should only buy a game if you like it in its current state, because there is no guarantee it will receive updates. So I don't think Steam is at fault when the developer stops updating the game.

Though I would say that Steam is required to give refunds if the developers have lied about the state of the game. If the developers claim the game is fully playable, but after three hours of play you can't play the rest of the game, you should be able to get a refund even though you've passed the two hour playtime limit for refunds. But as far as I'm aware Steam is typically agreeable in such cases.

And Steam has pulled games from the store before and offered refunds for developers that blatantly lie about the state of the game:

Earth: Year 2066, a $20 early access game, pulled from Steam

For better or worse, Steam is becoming an open publishing platform. That does wonders for the variety of games we get to choose from, but, as is the case with the mobile app stores, it also creates issues of quality control. Steam lets you pay for some pretty bad games, so when it removes one...

www.pcgamer.com

Speaking of trash. 90 percent of the games need to be taken off Steam. What was once a decent platform is nothing more then a used kleenex on the ground of a subway that's been flooded by a swamp.

While there are undoubtedly tons of games on Steam that no one should probably ever buy, I find that they only show up when you're using searching for games using several (niche) filters.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Early access should be be free. Basically you're paying to test a game, when people use to have jobs doing that.
Also how many games go EA and never come out, but take your money and you get no refund, yet Steam still makes money off selling trash or what's clearly a way to make money with no product. Would be considered a scam back in the day.

None of this should be blamed on Valve anymore than Hershey should be blamed for fat people. It's a tool, an option. If you don't like it, don't spend your money on it.

There are definitely EA games that are essentially scams, though, and this is the main reason for the thread. Valve needs to step in and stop Playway, for instance, from launching games in EA that it knows will never be worked on. And these small team indie games that have 1 user review after being on sale for over a month, while not intended to be scams, certainly feel like they were scams when they never get more than 1 or two updates before being abandoned (by necessity) by their developers.

Speaking of trash. 90 percent of the games need to be taken off Steam. What was once a decent platform is nothing more then a used kleenex on the ground of a subway that's been flooded by a swamp.

As someone with over 2000 games, many of them no one has ever heard of, I can say with confidence that most of what people put on Steam are genuine games that were made with great effort and care. That no one buys them is a real shame.

Are there low effort games? Sure, but not nearly as many as it is implied, and usually these are from known game mills like Playway, who will happily tell you that most of their games are low effort. It's literally a part of their business plan.

I don't quite get why people are willing to pay for an unfinished game, but if people are willing to pay for it then I see no problem with developers taking their money.

I buy lots of EA games, but, generally speaking, they are games without stories, or mostly without stories, and usually they have more content than many full games. I had over 400 hours in Satisfactory before it hit 1.0. I have 200 hours in Center Station Simulator (a pretty bizarre game), 100 hours in Enshrouded, etc.

For most EA games, I would consider EA to be kind of like a live service game, plenty to do and constant updates. It's a pretty fun model, always having new toys to play with.

 

[Pifanjr]

I buy lots of EA games, but, generally speaking, they are games without stories, or mostly without stories, and usually they have more content than many full games. I had over 400 hours in Satisfactory before it hit 1.0. I have 200 hours in Center Station Simulator (a pretty bizarre game), 100 hours in Enshrouded, etc.

For most EA games, I would consider EA to be kind of like a live service game, plenty to do and constant updates. It's a pretty fun model, always having new toys to play with.

There are quite a few EA games that are as finished as some full releases. Especially the kind of full releases that get years of updates afterwards anyway. Paradox games come to mind as an example. Those games change substantially after release, even if you don't buy the plethora of DLC, and there's a case to be made that the game is only really finished when they've stopped making DLC and you buy the complete bundle.

So I agree with you that not all Early Access games should be considered unfinished games, even if they will get many more (content) updates.

 

[Zed Clampet]

There are quite a few EA games that are as finished as some full releases. Especially the kind of full releases that get years of updates afterwards anyway. Paradox games come to mind as an example. Those games change substantially after release, even if you don't buy the plethora of DLC, and there's a case to be made that the game is only really finished when they've stopped making DLC and you buy the complete bundle.

So I agree with you that not all Early Access games should be considered unfinished games, even if they will get many more (content) updates.

It's almost a bad thing because that's what people's expectations are now for EA. When The Forest launched into EA (if your memory is good you are tired of hearing about this from me) it was as bare bones as it gets and didn't even save your progress. People being flexible about that was what got that game off the ground when the developer needed funds. Now if a developer treated EA like that they would get Mostly Negative user reviews and spiral downhill from there. If they released The Forest now, the game would be another EA failure and never get finished.

The truth is, however, that developers can't use EA that way anymore not just because players would reject it, but because there is too much competition now. When they released The Forest on Steam in 2014, there were probably only 3 or 4 new games a day. Now there are some days where that number is over 100.

 

[Pifanjr]

It's almost a bad thing because that's what people's expectations are now for EA. When The Forest launched into EA (if your memory is good you are tired of hearing about this from me) it was as bare bones as it gets and didn't even save your progress. People being flexible about that was what got that game off the ground when the developer needed funds. Now if a developer treated EA like that they would get Mostly Negative user reviews and spiral downhill from there. If they released The Forest now, the game would be another EA failure and never get finished.

The truth is, however, that developers can't use EA that way anymore not just because players would reject it, but because there is too much competition now. When they released The Forest on Steam in 2014, there were probably only 3 or 4 new games a day. Now there are some days where that number is over 100.

I think you can still use EA this way, but you'd have to have something innovating and a very good sales pitch to avoid having to compete with too many other games. For example, wasn't Palworld was pretty bare bones and buggy when it launched in Early Access? I'm not sure how it compared to The Forest, but I think it was mostly the premise more so than what was actually available that made the game so popular.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I think you can still use EA this way, but you'd have to have something innovating and a very good sales pitch to avoid having to compete with too many other games. For example, wasn't Palworld was pretty bare bones and buggy when it launched in Early Access? I'm not sure how it compared to The Forest, but I think it was mostly the premise more so than what was actually available that made the game so popular.

It depends on what part of Palworld you were interested in. I put over 100 hours into it at launch doing base building and collecting Pals and exploring, but the dungeons and story, etc. were completely missing.