Opinion Segment: A Talk About Early Access

Channel:

Command Line Vulpine

Subscribers:

6,970

Published on September 27, 2014 11:30:03 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW5l_S7fllE

Game:

Spacebase DF-9 (2014)

Duration: 15:17

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Up till now my mentions of Early Access are kinda spread out among a number of videos. Something has come up though and now I feel that I have to make a video devoted entirely to the subject.

So what happened was a game called Spacebase DF9, which is a starbase building and management game - the developers have decided the next update is the last one and they are going to call it 1.0. - Basically they're leaving it unfinished.

This might not have been worth a whole video to itself though if that was all, but there's more. This isn't just a single dude making the game, it's Double Fine. A company most people love, for games like Psychonauts and Broken Age (worth mentioning I don't like Double Fine's games, but it's a mostly aesthetic thing).

They got $400,000 in funding from a indie thing where they simply have to pay the money back. Which they did do, but afterwards money wasn't coming in enough to continue.

To me this isn't a failure of early access though. This is on Double Fine. There are companies making games in a very similar vein, 2D scifi colony management games that are doing it with half the funding Double Fine got and with far fewer people with far less experience - and yet these game are being constantly updated and are well on track to deliver all their promises.

Now I'm not saying Double Fine are just scumbags or something. I just think they weren't ready for this. As far as I know Broken Age was their first game they've made without a publisher. The whole idea with publishers is they tell you "Hey you have to get this done or you get no funding", they don't have someone telling them that now.

The difference between Broken Age and DF9 though is Broken age was on Kickstarter, paid straight by their fans to make it. there was still mode obligation there. Whereas with DF9 and taking money from this indie thing, all they had to do was get enough money back to pay them back and it wouldn't matter anymore.

That and Broken Age is pure 2D art and story. Whereas Spacebase DF9 is, well, I hate to make the insinuation this statement makes - but it's a real game with a lot more coding work to be done.

How do we stop this from happening again? Well, in my opinion, if we're talking about Steam. Valve could make it so developers have to sign a contract, where they have to meet these things:

1) For your game to be added to Steam Early Access it must at least be a playable build, some basic gameplay mechanics need to be there, it can't just be a tech demo.

2) You must have a list of features that will be added up to the 1.0 version launch. You must reach these features before declaring it 1.0

3) Failure to meet these features for 1.0 will result in your game being pulled from Early Access.

4) If the project is dropped, or you stop communicating for 6 months, your game will be removed from Early Access

That should solve most of the problems in a very lenient way. Of course Valve will never do that, since they like being so hands off.

All this being said, we HAVE to have Early Access. People easily forget what it was like before Early Access and Kickstarters. There was no such thing as indie games. You'd just have to hope a game you'd like would come out sometime. They were always 50-60 dollars. They would still come out unfinished, and since these were big companies they could tank it (where at least now small indies are done if they fail). Not to mention the AAA game market now is stagnent, you get your linear story games and you get your FPSes, no more, no less.