With the growing trends of crowdsourcing of Minecraft-esque development models resulting in more and more games being made available to gamers in very early stages of development, it only makes sense that some changes would be in order in regards to how digital distribution services go about delivering these ‘alpha’ versions of games. As such, today Valve both announced and opened a new section of the Steam store, Steam ‘Early Access‘, which allows those interested in experiencing the grueling and bug-filled days of a game’s alpha state to pay to do so.
Alpha access is generally discounted from the game’s final price. It means receiving access to an incomplete but frequently updated product and, in the best of cases, the right to download the finished game later on.
“The goal of Early Access is to provide gamers with the chance to ‘go behind the scenes’ and experience the development cycle firsthand and, more importantly, have a chance to interact with the developers by providing them feedback while the title is still being created,” explains a Valve rep.
“To support the interaction between Early Access players and developers, Steam offers easy and automatic updating of games, letting developers iterate quickly to respond directly to bug reports and feedback from customers.”
These are the first few games that will support Early Access play:
- 1… 2… 3… KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)
- Arma 3
- Drunken Robot Pornography
- Gear Up
- Gnomoria
- Kenshi
- Kerbal Space Program
- Kinetic Void
- Patterns
- Prison Architect
- StarForge
- Under the Ocean
Sources: ComputerAndVideoGames, Valve
Horrible idea, Valve putting their weight behind this model officially is the death of videogames
Yes, hyperbole, deal with it, I had a bad day.
Desura already does this, and they do it pretty well already. I’m fine when indies do it, since they need the help. Games like ARMA III? Hell, no.
What makes it any different from before? It’s just a label. It’s literally no different from the page for the game saying, “Pre-purchase now and get alpha access!”
It’s just a hub.
What makes it different is what is on offer with the indie and AAA clients.
Desura is the former, Steam is the latter, and the latter has a lot of problems with releasing half-finished, or coding problem filled (Tomb Raider and Aliens:CM), games at much higher prices. And they’ve got the bigger Q&A teams.
The guys on Desura need alpha help more than the bigger budget guys do, unless people really do like paying for games that are unfinished and depending on the reliability of a developer to release a patch to fix the problems.
Half finished or not, those are all multiplatform games. If you actually prefer the PC as your platform of choice, then you should know you’re looking at ports with optimization problems, big budget or not. Look at Fez on Xbox.
My point is, whether or not it’s indie or AAA, these are problems that’re going to happen no matter what. It’s not even going to cost you the consumer anything, so what difference does it make?
Like I said originally, it’s just a hub. Minecraft released alpha at a lower price outside of Steam and that game did fine.
>Drunken Robot Pornography
Well fuck, colour me interested.
Steam redlight when?
Wow, I never thought that Valve would ever do something worse than Greenlight. They have a way to prove me wrong, with blazing boldness…
-The Theory
Oh no, a feature on Steam that I won’t use. How will I ever cope.
Grow up, babbies.
I sort of like this, because I’m boycotting all of the other payment systems that are available to pre-purchase Prison Architect due to their association with unethical business practices.
I like it. Currently playing ArmA 3 and I’m happy I don’t have to wait a damn year till this comes out. There isn’t even a real reason to hate it:
“Waahh but paying for unfinished games, that’s outrageous!”. Yeah whatever. Same with preordering, advice: Just don’t buy it. Wait till the game is cheaper or, like in this case, finished. I love my early ArmA 3 access. The game is fully modable and, the ingame editor works as well as the tools provided by Bohemia. Plus the engine is pretty much backwards compatible so ArmA 2 stuff can be ported without too much work. And, and that’s a good point, I (maybe not alone, but with others) can actively influence the development, for example so they integrate features they normally would not (a good example would be deployable bipods).
If you really rage about that, grow up. Just don’t use this feature. Death of gaming? Yeah, sure, this death begins with 11 indie games and one game from a medium sized studio.
“We need 0Day sales and preorders, help us Gabe”
and thus Gabe created Early Access.