- What about Early Access Games?
- Do you feel differently about Early Access vs traditional preordering?
- If you are open to the idea in specific circumstances, what are those?
- How do you decide if a game qualifies?
I’m interested in the community thoughts on preordering and I’d love to have a thoughtful discussion on the matter.
Personally, I’m against preordering, except in specific situations where I want to actively support the development of a game.
I have been thinking about this because there is a game I’m considering preordering from a medium sized studio, but the reason I want to preorder is for the IP, rather than the game and it goes against my typical stance on this. The game is based on my favorite book series and part of me wants to encourage more games be made based on this series. At the same time, the book series has found commercial success and as a whole does not need my help.
I did name the specifics here because I’m hoping to encourage discussion on preordering as a whole, rather than my example, but if you want to know, I’ll drop a comment and we can have a discussion in the comment thread. :)
Pre-ordering existed for the customer’s benefit back when all games were physical and you wanted to guarantee you’d have a copy available for you at launch. At some point, companies realized that they could use it to forecast success or, more nefariously, entice you to buy a stinker of a game before you’ve had time to hear that it sucks. I haven’t bought physical games in a while now, but when I did, the last time I had a hard time acquiring one at launch was more than 20 years ago (I remember Halo 2 being the mile marker for when companies got to be pretty good at meeting demand). In the digital space, it makes even less sense. They still do pre-order incentives sometimes, for the same reason as above, even when the game is good, but the bonuses are so throwaway anyway that it usually doesn’t matter. Digital storefronts on PC have a pretty good refund policy, so if you’re diligent enough, you can pre-order the day before it comes out, get the bonus, let the dust settle on review scores, and decide if you want to keep the game with the pre-order bonus or just refund it. There’s very little risk in that. Without a pre-order bonus, there’s absolutely no reason to bother, and quite frankly, I don’t feel good about supporting those bonuses in the first place.
I have no issue with early access games, especially if the game lends itself to the model, which would be anything sufficiently sandboxy that can be heavily modified by changing some variables or adding a single mechanic. Larian’s RPGs are very freeform in the ways they let you solve problems and can be upended by different powerful abilities and whatnot; roguelikes are perfect for this model, because you’re replaying them a lot anyway; regardless of genre, the ones that would catch my eye are the ones that are looking for gameplay feedback and not outsourcing QA for finding bugs to a bunch of paid customers. The real problem with early access for me now is that there are so many finished games coming out all the time that look interesting that it’s difficult to justify playing one that’s not done.