What are your expectations for an early access game?

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my hairdresser analogy
Proves my point—I mean, look at the result:

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Zloth

Community Contributor
If there's not a lot of info around, you dont have to buy into EA day one on a promise, wait until its been out a while and check what people are saying about it before you buy in yourself.
I don't think that will help, unless you wait several months. People give EA games points just for their planned features and potential. The reviews should be mostly positive until it gets apparent that the developers have skipped town.

The other point is a really good one, though. If you stick to developers with a history, you probably won't run afoul of any that are dishonest.
 
I don't think that will help, unless you wait several months. People give EA games points just for their planned features and potential. The reviews should be mostly positive until it gets apparent that the developers have skipped town.

Yea maybe, theres a risk in everything. At least if they've gone to the trouble of making something functional theres more of a chance they'll continue to work on it.

Would be interesting to see numbers on Early Access games that get totally abandoned and never see 1.0, I can only find the PCG articel from 2014 which is irrelevant now.
 
I read Frasers article, but there aren't any up to date all time numbers The Steam thread has a link to a Steam Spy search page that has about 1300 ex-ea games.

That led me to this, which is a pool of 709 games with over 30000 owners and the length of time they were in EA on average whic was pretty interesting.

No numbers that include anything you might call shovelware or that hasnt sold many though, and no idea of how many of those there are.
 

Sarafan

Community Contributor
So what are your expectations for an early access game?

I literally bought only a few Early Access games. My biggest expectation is that the developers should actually hear the voice of their customers. Gamers that buy EA games should have an influence on the development process. I don't mind when the game is bugged while being released in EA, but I expect it to feature some of the final content. Basically I treat the whole EA thing as a pre-order with the optional access to a demo version or something similar. Those who expect that an early version will feature a whole game will always be disappointed.
 
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25-30 months in EA on average. Wow. So, what? About a year getting the game into EA-ready state? Then another 2.5 in EA. Then another half year at least supporting the game?
Yep. It should probably be noted that many games that go into EA are made by devs who are broke and understaffed. And when EA games fail, it's usually because they don't sell we enough for the devs to afford to continue development, although I've seen plenty of one and two-person teams who stuck with it to the bitter end even though not many people were buying/playing.
 

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