I think most of the games that would be in this position aren't willing or able to do that. It's not like there's a ton of income on stale half-released games with no active development, but people should be aware that's what they're looking at anyway.

Jokes on them, I got burned on a couple early access games in like 2012 or something so I quit buying early access. Wait for a release.

I can always tell that a game has given up when their "updates" are all about what the community has built in the game, rather than what the developers have built.

This is just pressure on the business folks, not the devs.

I’m a game dev of 20 years and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a dev with that sort of scammy inclination. On the business side of things though…

They just know that line going up steadily is more valuable than line going up exponentially until people get sick of your shit.

I feel like all that will happen is games will just release to 1.0 as “finished” when they clearly arent. It also may encourage rushing a game out thats a buggy mess.

Ive known some games to be very rough in early access that become absolutely gems a couple years later in development.

My favorite game ever is noita and i played it for almost 3 years of early access plus the 4 years since release. I'm really happy i got to see this great game be worked on. Tbf i think the bulk of the game was pretty much fleshed out already and the devs just made things better and added new stuff.

My only real counter to that is Project Zomboid. It's a complete game. It's in EA due to them wanting to add many more gameplay systems to the existing complete sandbox. They have a roadmap somewhere. They don't release major updates without multiple ones being added.

Last major update (41, a few years ago) was drivable cars (and all the spawning systems, loot, and map changes to make them fully fleshed out) and multiplayer. I'm sure there was more, but those were the standout things.

The new major update (42, available through a public opt-in beta branch right now) is a complete overhaul to gunplay, liquid management/mixing, crafting systems, lighting engine, and the addition of NPC animals with a full husbandry system. And that's only the highlights. It will stay in beta as they get better data for balancing the new features and the absurdly increased player count surfaces bugs they didn't find through internal testing. Once it's balanced and stable (maybe a year), they'll push this update to the main branch where it will continue to get minor bug fixes as things crop up (usually bugs surfaced by the modding community by the time it hits stable).

Then they'll keep crunching away on work on human NPCs and simulating story stuff with loot generation, which I believe will be the next major update in a few years.

Each intermediate release is a complete game, it just doesn't have the full set of features on the roadmap. It still is the best zombie survival sim on the market as is.

But it is absolutely a unicorn of early access.