Jay Barnson on Early Access Releases

Frayed Knights’ developer Jay Barnson reflects on the proliferation of alphas, betas and Early Access builds on his blog, and, as it turns out, he’s not entirely convinced it’s a good thing for the players:

So how much does it really matter when a game was (officially) released? Or whether or not a game is (officially) released right now?

For me with the wall of unplayed games I’m facing right now courtesy of all of the special sales and bundles over the last few years it’s unlikely that a game is going to get a second chance to make a first impression. If I play a game now that I’m not officially contributing to some kind of beta test for, it’ll either hook me so that I keep playing, or get discarded forever. It’s likely that I’ll overlook the improvements with future updates if the game didn’t excite me right off the bat. A game can go from (cool) to (more cool) in my mind with updates, but not from (lame) to (cool.) I’ll miss the move.

This is how I operate, and I know it. I’ve even avoiding playing some games that I already have (early access) to as a Kickstarter backer, unless I have been specifically asked for feedback.

It also erodes the newsworthiness of an actual, official game release. Stamping a game (1.0’³ is not much of an event when it’s already out and being played. But it’s most like the release of most indie games is anything most sites would consider newsworthy, anyway. And in many ways, the pre-release / constant update process is really more reflective of how games are really made, anyhow.

For me, it feels like the (cons) outweigh the (pros,) but that may be because I’m kinda stuck in the old way of doing things where things like official release dates actually matter, and labeling something as complete or (1.0’³ actually means something. They are handy for writing up retrospectives, game-of-the-year articles, or and comparing similar games that were released close together, but I’m not sure what else. Does anybody care when Chess was truly first invented?