10 Years Later, Early Access Turned Out Okay | Cold Take
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- čas přidán 13. 08. 2023
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This episode of Cold Take is brought to you by Robot Cache. Get your free copy of Torment: Tides of Numenera at the link: bit.ly/coldtakerc
RobotCache seems kinda too good to be true, I'd like to see a breakdown of how they make money.
Don't forget that Valve had to be strong-armed into implementing a refund policy on Steam by the European Union, which the rest of the world got as a bonus only because it was too hard to region-lock a refund system. They were also enticed by shame into putting it in place because EA Origin had one first.
EA/Origin's refund policy is far more robust as well.
Perhaps the most interesting upshot of Steam's refund policy, however, is that it completely killed the "walking simulator you can 'beat' in under two hours", and there was actual hue and cry about how creators of bite-size "vignette games" (this having been an actual "thing" in 2013-14 or so) couldn't tell their stories without people buying the game (which usually sold for under $5), consuming the amuse-bouche of content, and then refunding it because it took them less than two hours to complete.
If Steam upped the refund window to five hours, I'd be OK with the games it would subsequently kill; not for nothing did "it took FOUR HOURS" become a meme via the Angry Joe Show.
I think GOG has the best refund policy, you can refund any game up to 30 days no matter the time played (i think). Now obviously if you do it too often and abuse the system you might get your request denied
This is important
Was it the EU? I always thought it was an Aussie thing with the lawsuit.
@@SirProtagonist I member it being the EU
the heart and soul of the franchise will be patched in at a later date
is a great line
"Fun and excitement not included".
Lots of games starts with an idea of making a game mechanic work.
Devs try to iron out the inner workings to make that happen.
Through the process, the charm of the game is built and the heart of the game starts to beat.
Yyup, great line.
The one thing I did find problematic in this video is conflating Cyberpunk's situation with Battlefield.
Yeah yeah, big studio, broken launch. But under the hood, those are two completely different stories.
Battlefield has no heart for a while now, and unlikely that'll ever change. Just an EA milking machine.
Cyberpunk was built on heart and soul. Yeah, it arrived with skin missing and bones arranged a bit random. But the core gameplay and bittersweet story to hook you was there from the get-go, only everything else so shit it didn't worth the hassle.
They really entered the AAA space with this one, and made noob mistakes playing by the big idiots' rules.
Horrid mismanagement, scared shitless of investors and falling of the hype train.
While devs had the passion but the radically different gameplay than the Witcher led to poor estimates of required work and unfocused content creep all over the place.
In the end they pulled through.
I personally knew the fall was coming when the delays and the marketing webt crazy in the last 2 months. Should've pumped and dumped stocks, but was too busy with other stuff.
Anyway bought physical for half price around 1.3 when I was sure they are committed to repairing. That "early access" was worth my money, but not my time. Had a bit of unboxing and vibin' with my GF. Then put it on the shelf.
1.6 Edgerunners is the official release as far as I'm concerned, that's when I started playing and it was GOTY 2022 for me.
Listening to this is like I'm in a 1920's speakeasy going over business with a chainsmoking fiddler.
Same 😄
Frost's buttery-smooth voice puts the lie to the chainsmoking part, but if he took up two packs a day and you gave him a few years, he could come out of it sounding like Tom Waits or Clint Eastwood.
Frost's voice and rhythm are top notch. I could listen to him read a phone book
Fiddler?
"Pour me another one, Sheila... and another one for that joe over there. On me. Keep the change."
mad props for the TB shoutout, this topic was near and dear to his heart, one of the few great people to speak up for the little guy way back when
tb?
TotalBiscuit! He was one of the biggest gamer youtube channels during that initial gamer waver back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Reviewed AAA games, indie games and critiqued business practices in the gaming industry
@@XXJakXXX yea I just now discovered he died man, tragic..
I think my personal favorite early access success story is Risk of Rain 2. Hopoo Games made an outstanding sequel and evolution to their 2D platformer roguelike and made a 3D third person roguelike and they both have their benefits and downsides. The drastic change allows the original game to stand on its own because they each play so differently
And now they are remaking the first one to be more like the second one 🤦♂
@@semvision in what way? the trailers literally just look like a remake
as always its important that we don't pull our criticism to the AAA industry to indies. early access is bad when you have the budget, time, and experience to release a full game. but its great when you are 5 guys living in different countries working from their parents basement because they can't pay rent. its bad when you just want to sell your game early to please investors and finish it later. its great when you want to develop your game together with the community, and price the EA accordingly.
Then again Baldurs Gate 3 was in early access for 3 years and that worked amazingly well for them, maybe AAA should just officially adopt the early access model.
@@MichaelChisholmChizzieRascalthe thing is you gotta actually finish your game
@@MichaelChisholmChizzieRascalHonestly, would anyone really be mad at AAA companies if they actually used the Early Access system? The whole problem is that they insist in labeling their broken disasters as fully functional games.
@@kveller555 but then they'd still be selling you "broken disasters" except it's called different. same vibe as a kid eating the contents of a spoon just because the parents called it an airplane. instead of buying a game expecting a complete package *now* with no guarantee, you now buy a game expecting it will be a complete package *later* with no guarantee.
@@MichaelChisholmChizzieRascal that's only impressive if you ignore how many early access games as a whole crash and burn. larian's the exception, not the rule. people talk about baldur's gate like it changed the world when larian's a big studio that just made gangbusters from divinity 2. they couldve definitely afforded to not go early access. and even then, after getting the playerbase to fund its development + playtest it for 3 years, it's still nickling and diming you despite popular opinion. there's the "deluxe edition upgrade" right there on the steam page full of stuff they couldve included in the base game for free.
Frost's voice is so soothing I think I could listen to him read aloud the ingredients on the back of a shampoo bottle and still come away entertained
Some say, in the dead of night, you can still see the beaked visage of "The Steam Cleaner" wandering around the early access page, lifting the worthy to prominence while dragging the rest to a shallow grave.
Glad TB isn't forgotten ❤
man, I personally know the writer/director of that 7 Days to Die trailer you used. Always thought it was kinda bad, but cool to see it being used years down the road. Im gonna let him know about this video, awesome stuff.
Also that game is like 12 years in early access and still "alpha"...insane...
"pay $70 to be an alpha tester and you cant even put it on your resumé"
That hits home
The mention of "design by committee" creep is I think a very important concept to highlight in the indie/smaller game development space. I agree with Frost on the importance of genuine feedback and I too worry about too much feedback in the development and early access phase. Sure things like bug, technical issues, and certain levels of user experience are valid to consider; however I feel like smaller developers owe it to themselves to make their game rather than a game they believe their audience wants. Often times the audiences doesn't even know what it wants until they get it, and that's sorta the magic of a great game.
I would hope developers use feedback to help make the games their fullest selves' creatively rather than creating the game they think they players want. It's important to consider the audience, but they aren't the ones making the game, the developers and their creative vision are. I trust the developers that trust their creative ambitions. I would be weary of any feedback back that says "make your game more like another game I like."
We don't need "More of game X but this time it's Y" we need whatever it is that make your game special. Taking influences is fine, healthy even, but I don't think indie games ever need to copy each other's homework but make it look different. This is why I think early access is great (when done properly) it gives developers the room to figure out what exactly makes their game special. Early access in general i think is a boon for indie/smaller game development and the culture of people who give a damn about gaming. Not every early access game is going to sell a billion copies (not that sales are the only measure of value or merit), but early access when done right showcases the strength of gaming outside the AAA realm.
I will add I think we all collectively agree on Frost's last point of big box AAA studios using early access as a development model is tactless at best and downright abusing the model at worst.
absolutely agree. I feel like the most successful early access titles are the ones that have a vision and stick to it. Using early access just as an opportunity to fix bugs, QoL issues and to get funding.
There's a piece of writing advice I heard at one point: listen to complaints but not solutions. If somebody says something feels bad in the writing/narrative and you should change it to be more like x, you should only listen to them saying it's not working, then figure out how to fix it yourself.
@@RobinClowerThere was a great quip that Mark Brown passed along in a Game Maker's Toolkit video awhile back: "If your customer says something is broken, they're almost always right. And when they offer a solution, they're almost always wrong."
The flaw of design-by-committee rests on the developers who let the players dictate how to improve a game. Bill Hader had a great line about writing that equally applies to game design: “When people give you notes on something, when they tell you it’s wrong, they’re usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re wrong… Once they say ‘here’s what I would do’, just turn them off because they’re always wrong. You got to figure it out for yourself.”
@@erakfishfishfish interesting. I'd say I agree with that perspective. People can usually "feel" when something is off but not always can they tell what exactly that is or how to fix it, especially when it comes to game design.
Ya can't pin gripes with Darkest Dungeon 2 on the EA feedback -- Red Hook had a very specific vision for that game and it was divisive from the start.
They're a very headstrong outfit and the prime example of this was when they _introduced_ corpses in DD1 the stink in the Steam reviews had the game "Mixed", yet they stuck to their guns and learned that they could stick to their own vision despite the descenting voices. DD2's design maybe many things, but it ain't a creative compromise.
“If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.” - Henry Ford
This is correct. Although I still think DD2 clashes with too many core ideals of the IP, which makes it feel commodified/casualified or whatever
@@fedja4491 Yeah. I love DD1, but DD2's style of gameplay just does not work for me at all. All the power to them for trying something new, but it was not for me.
Yeah, I like the travelling carriage to final boss mechanic in principle, but would have preferred a more DD1 roster builder with building up classes and clear sequential progress instead of the more randomised game we have.
Man, I miss TotalBiscuit what a legend!
Billy Joel was right. Only the good die young. TotalBiscuit died at 33, meanwhile (insert career politician from party you hate in whatever country you live in) is over 70 and refuses to die.
RIP TB, too early man. He was younger than me.
Baldurs Gate 3 JUST showed what makes early access really work, same as Hades. Consistent communication from the devs and sensible handling of community Feedback.
In the same vein you can't really put the way DD2 played on community Feedback though. Those simpler mechanics as such where there from the start of the Release, after all.
Yeah I'm surprised he didn't mention baldur's gate, as it's the prime example of early access right on everybody's mind right now.
@@JaySwag77it does somewhat contradict his point about EA being good for indies but bad when used by AAA
@@markwazny6361 for real! Although the situation there is a bit more complex than AAA vs indie. Larian is led/managed by artists, people with vision who feel strongly about their project. Other AAA studios are led by money heads who don't care if a game is great as long as it makes them rich.
@@markwazny6361Well it depends on the definition of "indie". Does it mean independent studio or a small studio?
Because Larian is now a independent medium-large size studio that doesn't have a publisher. They dont have that Microsoft/EA funding that Bethesda, Obsidian or Bioware have.
To be honest, Baldurs gate 3 didnt plan to be in EA so long. But larian couldnt expect covid and the war (as they had a Studio in russia)
"Don't buy triple-A games until the first patch after full release" is an entirely reasonable bar. I'll buy all kinds of early access games, but not from big studios. They just don't have the track record for it.
I go a step further and say you shouldn't buy AAA games until all the DLC is out and there's a "Complete" (or whatever) version that includes everything in one purchase, but yeah, there's really no reason to buy any major game at release these days considering the states they release in. Day 1 buying is just paying more for an inferior, incomplete product.
AAA early access is an entirely different problem on top of all that though. I agree with this video that the big companies have absolutely no business using that system, it's for those who need the money to cross the finish line at all. The well established publishers/developers almost certainly don't absolutely need the early access money to keep the lights on until they finish, they just want more money faster. Good track record, bad track record, that's not the issue. They shouldn't be doing the early access thing on sheer principle. Spend your own money on your own project first, crowd funding of any form should only be the final desperation option for people who don't have their own money to spend in the first place. Otherwise, if the goal is just to minimize direct personal risk, that's what investing is for.
AAA games don't even get a minute of my attention until they've got a "Complete" or "Ultimate" or "Game of the Year Edition" (even if the game was a critical bomb with a 4.7 Metacritic user score...) AND they're on a deep discount during one of Steam's even-the-sales-are-on-sale blowout events (the Summer and Holiday sales tend to be like this.)
As for an indie title, my MO on those is to wait until a few CZcamsrs whose gaming tastes broadly line up with mine (if I've commented "your channel is dangerous to my wallet" on one of their posts, they're going to play a role in a purchasing decision I'm on the fence about) get a chance to play it on a stream or a Let's Play. Exceptions are given for developers who have hit home runs with me in the past-I'm totally willing to buy their next game, sometimes even in Early Access.
Nintendo 1st party releases (other than Pokemon anyway) are worth purchasing right away since they can be finished without a patch. They can run better and get some bug fixes after however.
@@callak_9974 True, but Nintendo doesn't do early access. But Nintendo is a rare special case, and maybe console developers are also more likely (certainly not guaranteed) to land a working game on release day. PC, on the other hand...
@@oasntet Yeah nintendo is usually an anomaly not worth comparing to.
They're very resistant to change, and few companies are likely to emulate them.
RIP TB, the king of gamers
TotalBiscuit gets mentioned 5 years after he dies
Shit, it's really been that long, huh.
@@LoganChristianson I was off by two it was 5 years ago
I do support early access titles, on the following conditions:
1. The developer is not a mainstream studio rich enough to have private senators. I generally don't like the big studio games anyway, I don't find them fun to play, and now they're releasing them "unfinished." Nope! You give executive bonuses larger than the development costs of my actual favorite games, you can pay your team to publish a finished game.
2. The game must be unique and offer something new. Kerbal Space Program. Subnautica. Factorio. Satisfactory. There's not a lot of games in these niches. I did not buy Stardew Valley in early access, because it was merely The Best Harvest Moon Game. We had one of those already. I bought my copy after 1.0. We didn't have a "You know train sets. This game is that, but for NASA."
3. The developer must have a direct and honest method of communicating the current and future state of the game to customers. I again cite KSP and Satisfactory. Both are/were fond of coming out and saying "We're adding this to patch 0.8.2, we're changing how this works, we are not adding this and this, we're removing this." Another big green flag here is "We are never adding x to the game." That's that "strong developer vision." "We're not adding base defense to the game, it's not the experience we're trying to go for, we're building combat as a smaller part of our experience, so we're just not doing base defense. If you want it, make a mod." If you pull your best Sean Murray impression "Yis you can do that in the game" I ain't buying it because you're lying.
The Zero Punctuation review on Shadows of Doubt sold me on the game; even in early access I've still gotten literal days of enjoyment out of it already.
On the topic of strong developer vision, again with Shadows of Doubt: I sincerely hope the SoD devs turn a deaf ear to the people whining that they do not get to have a gun. The gameplay loop is centered around pattern identification, investigative work, problem solving, calculated risk-taking, and a degree of desperate stealth. Being the guy who just draws his gun and shoots first is none of those things.
If I had a nickel for every indie cozy game that's basically Stardew Valley but the alpha isn't even half-finished and it costs more on Steam than Stardew does, I could pay my student loans.
There's no accountability, it's basically just the Ferengi First Rule of Acquisition: "Once you have their money, you never give it back."
Worse yet, letting the community participate in the process sands all the innovation off the game and turns it into just another derivative, unoriginal title with no vision.
Make a complete game then sell it. Indie solo devs are getting as bad as the AAA industry when it comes to buggy, unfinished games they charge actual money for.
In the past 1-2 years i ve seen like 20 different vampire survivor clones, sometimes it feels like im browsing google play store with the amount of rehashed copy cats
@@ThunderingRoarIt's a double-edged sword, because lazy copycats are just lame cash grabs, but "Doom clones" in the 1990s are how we got the entire first-person shooter genre.
@@SimuLord To add to the point: Stardew Clone Graveyard Keeper is a great game on its own and i prefer it to stardew valley and Vampire Surivior Clone Boneraiser Minions mixes the formula up enough that it feels like its own title.
A game that has misused the Early Access-like model would be Starcitizen. Started out in 2012, and in 2023 it's still in Alpha. Not on Steam I know. But yeah, smaller devs can make their games happen with the help of Early Access. Which is a good thing.
This is it.
The quiz.
The quiz every one of us has prayed for, that one time you forgot to study.
And now I think back to what The Scarecrow said in The Dark Knight: "Buyer Beware! I told you my compound would take you places. I didn't say they'd be places you wanted to go to." That should apply to unfinished games we pay real money for.
The quiz that ended up being the absence of a quiz was life changing. 10/10
For every one game that actually releases through the early access program there are 10 which put out two updates (the first update is always the Cash Shop) and go absolutely silent as if no one had ever been working on them
Well said. The Darkest Dungeon comparisons specially hit home. I'm a big fan of the first one, but the second one just left me confused.
I'm getting into the farm sim, crafting part of Dave The Diver and they did a tasteful job of adding only a little bit and once I get what I want I can completely ignore it.
I can't stand the games that stand directly behind their crafting sim errand runner. I'd rather bake bread in a heatwave than gather another 20 sticks for a workbench.
I love cozy games, but man, are they ever prone to being turned into repetitive-loop slogs.
Part of the problem is that every developer wants to throw the kitchen sink into a game in that genre and they lose sight of the core gameplay loop that actually makes their game fun.
You've got two choices in that instance. You either put a bunch of stuff in and take the time and the effort to make all of it excellent (Stardew Valley pulled this off, but that's because Eric Barone is a mad genius who caught lightning in a bottle with his Harvest-Moon-But-Better development approach.)
Or you go hard on a simple but effective core gameplay loop "do this to make that possible, build a solid frame story around it, and never let the player stagnate" that works as well in Dave the Diver as it does in other great crafting/farming games like My Time at Sandrock and even games like Recettear where the same concept is used for an item shop dungeon crawler.
One game I've watched actually get worse during its Early Access development is Traveller's Rest, a game that started out as a fast-paced Diner Dash meets the old Tapper arcade game core loop and devolved into a bunch of kludged-together mechanics that don't work together with more such mechanics to come, thanks entirely to the developers wanting to please everyone on their Discord instead of making a game that's actually good.
Expeditions: Conquistador was a fantastic example of early access helping get a relatively innovative idea for a game to a finished product, and helped the studio off the ground so well they eventually made Expeditions: Viking, as well as Expeditions: Rome.
"That's Latin, darlin'..."
It appears Mr. Frost is an _educated_ man! Now I know I hate 'im.
Cant wait for Starfield to go throught the same cycle again just for people to claim "its good now no really" like a year later..
@@graveyardshift6691 To be honest, my issue with Bethesda is less bugs and a shoddy release, and more just a subpar game.
Simplified mechanics and lazy writing is what I expect out of a Bethesda game nowadays. They really just make accessible 3D sandbox games rather than interesting RPG's anymore.
Cyberpunk 2077 had bugs and a crappy release, but I still like that game FAR more than Skyrim and Fallout 4 because the writing and quests are just more interesting. They've gutted most of the class building, skill checks, dialogue choices, etc. and just focus on 'infinite' exploration, and 'infinite' quests to grind through forever.
@@pagatryx5451Bethesda just hasn't grown creatively since 2006. "Prettier Oblivion" just doesn't work anymore in 2023.
@@SimuLord Honestly at least Oblivion had some damn good quests. The Dark Brotherhood for example is legendary. There's also Shivering Isles, and some of those Daedric Quests like Sheogorath's Khajiit village.
I definitely agree that the early signs of Bethesda's decline were present in Oblivion, but they at least had creative writers who made quests that really felt like D&D encounters and scenarios that gave that RPG feel.
But Skyrim? Game feels like everything was AI generated. Them simplifying the gameplay was one big decline, but them simplifying the writing and quests just killed my interest in them completely.
@@_Zeruca And people keep crying over Cyberpunk without actually making any real criticisms. But I don't block them because I'm not a pu55y, and I prefer to win arguments, not run away from them. I also didn't try to "convince" you of anything. I don't give a damn about you. Just making a statement about my personal experience.
I'd be the first to call out CD Projekt Red for the game's crappy release and marketing but I find it amusing how upset and emotional people become at the concept of Cyberpunk being "good now" after the devs stuck releasing updates for it for years without abandoning it, but will happily spend 70 quid on Diablo 4. If people could actually hold the real villains of the industry accountable instead of being butthurt at the fact Cyberpunk wasn't some wonder game, we'd probably have a much better industry.
*with mods. Its good a year later with mods.
Ultrakill's pretty damn awesome. Like it's clear why it's in early access, there's still a 3rd act that needs to come out, but even what's there has enough depth and complexity that you can spend hours mastering it. I've played the game for 16 hours, and still can't coin slap or rocket ride.
I also want to praise its fantastic accessibility. I've been playing on controller with aim assist because I've always been more comfortable with a controller than a mouse, and it still works perfectly
I can’t accept early access as successful when Disney is putting out games in Early Access, and the vast majority of EA games never release. I can go on steam right now and find hundreds of games that have passed their full release deadline. It would take me forever to track down 1 that made it that you don’t already know off the top of your head (Ark). I don’t find 5 success stories worth a thousand failures.
Bannerlord got out of early access in two-plus years, not bad considering its EA launch was right at the beginning of the pandemic.
Both My Time games (My Time at Portia and, assuming they get even plausibly close to their already-announced Sept. 26 release date, My Time at Sandrock) got through EA quick like bunny-Sandrock completed development in less than 18 months from the playable-but-definitely-early-beta May 2022 launch.
You do raise a valid point-as I commented elsewhere in this thread, I could pay off my student loans given a nickel for every EA failure-but when developers take the Early Access launch seriously and have a legit roadmap they're holding themselves accountable to, it tends to go better than expecations would indicate.
The real red flag for me is "we want to involve the community in development." That's code for "we have no idea how to make a game and we need you folks to tell us what to put in."
Anyone else actually know what 'caveat emptor' meant before watching this video?
I think this is the third time I have heard the term in the last 10 years. Maybe the fourth. Such a handy pair of words. Pretty fun when people pretend to know what it means and you get to laugh at them later.
that shadows of doubt stream was hilarious
8:00 This is what's most terrifying. More money being funnelled upwards and gamers being turned into workers.
Yeah, that's kinda my take, too. With respect to the AAA early access and bad release stuff, you're not just *unpaid* QA/Test, you're *paying* for the privilege of having your experience, time, and thoughts mined for the benefit of the AAA publishers.
3:33 RIP TotalBiscuit.
Great episode and wordplay as always!
Is the Quiz coming with the full 2.0 release?
This is lovely..He's reasonable, well paced..
Food for thought: In the world of medication there are different stages of clinical trials. Phase IV (4) trials are those of drugs already approved by the FDA. They are long term and wide in scope. Because they know that even if you have done testing on a few thousand patients before FDA approval, that is nothing compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people who will now be taking whatever medication. Point being, it is not wrong to use the people buying a product as an additional level of testing. It is wrong to go straight from pre-clinical trials or phase 0 (or phase 1) straight to phase IV, which is essentially what so many video games try to do these days.
Great video are love the lay back feeling to this
Love it, please keep making more and more cold takes.
Satisfactory changing the entire game engine while it's in early access making it unplayable for older PCs after having 400 hours of game time logged.
Hey everyone, dumb question: did Frost ever appear and show his face in any videos?
He's on a lot of our streams now. Check out The Editor's Hour, or some recent Post-ZPs, Wishlist or Childhood Classics.
Ye, hes routinely in escapist podcasts with facecam
He's been on camera in plenty of the live stuff on the channel. The Escapist sticks to the formula of "looks like a Zoom call".
This is an interesting take for sure. As an 'older' gamer I tend to avoid early access, kickstarter, whatever. Give me the 1.0 product!
As an aspiring indie dev though, I think I should have put our game on Early access to set expectations and hopefully get feedback. Then again I'm not sure a single player story focused horror game would have done well in early access either. Not all games are made for it, and thats pretty interesting in itself.
Please, please leave some more breathing room between the end of the video and the ad read. Even if you're obligated to jam it in there before the credits (though I hope you're not!), at least let two or three seconds pass so we have time to digest the last few words!
I’m very happy with the call out to the giants we stand on today. TotalBiscuit was ahead of his time and imagine the journalistic force he would be in gaming today 😢
Totally aced that quiz!
I think the biggest trick with Early Access is making sure that the developer is giving to give you value.
Darkest Dungeon worked because it was basically a 60-70% done, so the price was fair and they could have stopped earlier and still have the game be worth the money.
What is the movie playing at the start of the video?
0:38 to skip the sponsor.
Dont get me wrong but this is my personal experience with early access. As much as I'd love to support legit dev teams I can't see myself going over again like I did with Hades. I love that game and Supergiant but I played early version since it showed on Steam and I haven't touch it since v1.0 release due to burnout and clearing backlog. That said Frosty's points still stand and I wish every dev team no matter the size a fruitfull productions.
The cool thing is you can take that experience and in future sit back and wait for the game to be done, done, and walk down the red carpet to your fully tested and vetted experience. It's what I've been doing with AAA RPGs for years since I bought Skyrim and watched in horror as my playthrough glitch a dozen different ways completely jolting me out of the experience over and over again until I turned it off in frustration and didn't go back until the GOTY edition was out, by which point it was very much playable and even a little improved beyond the bug fixes. Half the time by the time I buy the games, it's 75% off and the other half the time I realize I have no real interest in it after all and save myself the time and go find something in my few hundred unplayed games I've already purchased instead. It's the best problem I've ever had.
I wonder what Frost has to say about Kickstarter, which has somewhat disappeared from the mainstream and become more of a niche platform and more shady place..
Kickstarter has been terrible for games. Not for funding them or even for the many scams.
But because when you promise you're going to put a feature in, and people have paid for that feature, and it turns out during development that the feature you promised is actively making your game worse and was a bad idea, you can't take it out because you start getting review-bombed and even getting death threats and your overall game ends up being trash because of the combination of bad design decisions and shattered motivation kills the passion and love and gamers can tell.
@@SimuLord I'm sticking with Patreon for stuff like that, for that exact reason.
Just let people choose to fund a team, instead of bakrolling a specific project with specific promises.
Either you like us enough to commit $5 a month or you don't pay us at all (I mean aside from actual purchases lol)
Hey, RIP Totalbiscuit. Haven’t seen that name in a long, long time
Cold Takes and Stuff of Legends are my new favorites. of anything.
Dave the Diver is NEXON experimenting with a manufactured indie label to develop and market their game.
Baldurs Gate 3 is a great recent example of a game that went into early access, kept people updated, utilized community feedback well, and released a finished product that is simply amazing.
larian sold you a demo that was far too large for what it was for a full price and they only barely managed to not get crucified because they had enough goodwill built up from the two original sins being so beloved
@@richardvlasek2445 All early access games are paid demos, and people surely were more willing to pay for it because of the goodwill built up from previous successes. The only way this is a problem is if they lied about it on the store description or marketing.
@@richardvlasek2445 also helped that the "demo" was REALLY GOOD, so it was easy to have faith with the rest of the game.
*sips on single malt scotch*
“i concur”
Did will forte make the advertisement at the start of this video?
At 4:50 you say "it is an alumni" when it should be "it is an alumnus". Alumni is plural, he is an alumnus, they are alumni.
What movie are those clips from?
Pretty great video on both the positive and negatives of early access
What movie is the scene with the bearded dude with the bow and arrow from?
It’s the trailer for 7 days to die
7 Days to Die live-action trailer. It's quite old, I believe.
I respectfully disagree with you. As you said, Early Access showed the industry (both 'AAA' and indie) that you don't need to release a finished game, just a pinky promise that you'll eventually release a finished game. The industry has shown that it is an industry, and have taken the wrong lessons from it.
I feel it's in a similar space of people's reaction to No Man's Sky. 'They'll fix it, just watch!' is a common mantra around shaky releases and Early Access games. No Man's Sky was the exception, not the rule and the same goes for the sea of Early Access games. The success stories are not the rule, they're the exception and making it ok for games to take the consumer's money and be made complete *eventually* , maybe, shouldn't be something we're ok with.
Battlebit Remastered is a wonderful title that I am very curious how it would have gone down had Battlefield been doing just fine by the time of it's release and not.....well whatever it's doing now.
Always a good listen, even with the jab in the ear ad reads in the beginning and end
For every channel that does great ad reads (Shadiversity and Aging Wheels leap immediately to mind), there's a channel like this one that basically functions as an ad for Sponsorblock or similar inline ad blocker extensions.
I would delete the ad at the end, it just robs frost of the last word, and it has a big impact.
Imagine if Fatshark just simply admitted Darktide has been Early Access the entire time
Early access works great for developers, but its terrible for consumers. So many games hit their peak before even being officially released and fizzle out. DayZ, VRchat, escape from tarkov, so so many more games that may never see a proper release. Its a strange and very disheartening state of affairs.
My cold take: If you charge money for your product, it’s not an alpha/beta/early access, it’s just a release, with planned extra content.
Doesn’t mean anyone will finish those plans.
depends how much you charge and what expectations you give the consumer. if you are pricing the game according to the content you have and making it clear its not a finished product, then its early access. if you are selling a unfinished product for full price and trying to save face by saying "its early access" then its a bad release.
@@danilooliveira6580That's a distinction without a difference. You're still selling an experience that people who are willing to wait for you to finish it have an incentive not to buy in its current state. The only real difference is in the implied level of trust on the part of the audience, but that's not relevant to the actual game.
@@SimuLord one gives the consumer the expectation that they may not enjoy the game since its unfinished, but if they want to try it or support the development of the game, they won't need to pay full price and will get the game for cheaper by buying early. the other one is an excuse to appease investors by releasing games faster than your developers can realistically do.
Yahtzee now reviews Early Acess? O.O Maybe I'll have a look at is someday.
What annoys me about Early Access, is that many people treat them as full releases. In almost all lists of upcoming releases and the like, games that start into early access are listed as well, mixed with full releases. I'm not interested in buying an alpha version of a game, don't make me separate these alpha versions out all the time.
Another annoying thing is, if you want to look something up about the game once it is released, the internet is full with completely outdated information, usually there is way more never updated early access information than stuff related to the full release. Recent example: If you want to look up some information on what race you should choose for your intended Baldur's Gate 3 character, you see attribute bonuses all over the place. Only few places say "there is no difference in attributes between the races, this feature was removed in the final release"
My only Early Access experiences were Valheim and Bannerlord. Both were excellent games that delivered what I was looking for from their genres. Sure they didn't have the 'end game' sections completed, but it's rare that I ever get that far in anything unless it is a deeply linear story. (Are either of them out of early access? Any new content I should return for?)
Valheim just put up some new content a couple of weeks ago, but it's not huge.
Bannerlord came out of Early Access in October of 2022, coinciding with the game's release on consoles. Whether it's worth coming back to...ehh...I have 300 hours in it and I think I've seen just about everything I wanted to see out of it, so I only come back to it when I'm specifically in the mood to play a Mount&Blade game. If you've conquered Calradia once, you've conquered it a thousand times, the frame story's just there to give a bit of context and direction to a core gameplay loop that hasn't radically changed since the first game came out in 2008.
Where are the captions?
We had to upload a new version to include the sponsor, so they'll be added back in soon.
thx again
Dude RIP TotalBisucuit
Without Early Access, we wouldn't have gotten Baldur's Gate III in the form that it's in. I guess that's worth all the minecraft clones
I highly recommend to anyone interested in how Early Access can be a detriment to how a game develops to watch SovietWomble's videos on DayZ.
Seems like most things it can both ways. You can have games that use Early Access well and others that use it poorly. Not really a reflection on Early Access itself.
2:24 games as a service model is the only reason to pay money for a game, if the game has no online or support and it comes complete in box y even pay for a copy of it? they know to leave these games half baked or to release updates forever so your game version is always outdated or cant play multiplayer if you downloaded it somewhere
My favorite game ever, X4: Foundations, would not be possible without the 20-people indie studio Egosoft releasing the game in a buggy state and slowly improving it during the years. It's too niche to be made by a bigger company and too complex to be released without lots of broken corners. I'm not upset by this, it's a deep simulation, nevertheless I had a great time with it since day one and have done my fair share of bug reports.
Your line about how consumers are now paying for the responsibility of QA-ing AAA games is especially horrifying due to how easily I can imagine some C-suite executive pushing that exact idea as a promotion-worthy pitch to increase profits. It's nauseating.
Great video guys.
Always wait for the goty edition to get the complete game was once only an ubisoft thing. Now Overwatch 2 shows that goty edition or 2.0 might not be the finally complete game. But just them removing parts of the game to bring them back later.
Never stop frost
The episode that summarises 4 other episodes.
Lol, there is no quiz, that's the quiz.
Quite a lot early access games just “release” a completely unfinished game, when they are fed up or out of money. Immediately abandon it, no finishing, no bugfixes.
Before release they sell a promise and steam reviews are pretty good.
After release the reviews totally tank.
My worst EAs: hammerting, the long dark.
My best EAs: Dave the diver, derail valley simulator.
❤❤❤
Early Access has bitten me in the ass pretty consistently, and several years ago I set Steam up so it stopped referring EA games to me, been fine ever since....at least Steam is pretty clear on when a game is EA, not all the other eshops do that so well (Xbox, GOG and Epic all need more obvious transparency in their terminology I feel). A person below suggested 1 in 10 EA games actually release....It feels to me closer to 1 in 50, but hey, could just be the types of games I am interested in, so who knows.
This is why I condem what Larian did with BG3. They released in EA with a price tag of full AAA. That's unaceptable. When you buy an EA game, you have the risk of the game never be finished, the studio, no matter how ethical and trustworthy, might go bankrupt, or blow up. An EA game should never ever be full price because you are not buying a fully finished game, what a novel concept!
But everybody is too amazed by BG3 to understand constructive criticism, whenever I say this I get downvoted to oblivion because I dared to critique their beloved game.
I mean they priced it as they did and a lot of people thought it was fine and paid into it. As long as a studio is clear that the game is in early access I think charging any price is fine, and if it's what people are ok with they buy in, otherwise the early access will fizzle out.
Excellent Cold Take!
You can't promise a quiz and not deliver.
I wish 7 days to die would finish but idk why it has taken so long
I hope all this big talk about calling out AAA on the scuzy money practices is the start of what should have been done a long time ago. It's long past time we start sending the message that they can't keep getting away with this nonsense.
Early access turned out ok, but microtransactions are the devil.
Holy crap. Watching random gopro footage, being in absolute confusion, only to reveal it was a 7 DAYS TO DIE TRAILER!?!? Perfect example of trailer bullshitery
No.. it didn't?