I’ve seen many devs cite the refund window as why they don’t need to bother maintaining a demo. They’re wrong about not needing a proper demo, but people definitely do treat the refund window as a demo phase, not merely a technical test.
Combat Complex posted an update, so have been enjoying some more high quality twin-stick shooter action. Finally got through the brutal room I was throwing myself at in floor eight (the update definitely makes it easier to get through hard spots, which has ups and downs), and have had a generally much easier time in the following rooms. Found an elevator to floor ten, in case I’m getting too cocky.
Odinfall finally opened their early access, so been exploring that crazy mess. Very Nuclear Throne like, but with extras like slotted weapon upgrades and some more decent looks. Runs are a lot like stepping on a land mine, but it’s pretty fun.
Having a lot of fun throwing things around in Maraka. Simple arcade style roguelite, where you do a lot of flinging things at things and slamming things around. May look horde-survivor-ish from the walking in enemy hordes, but you’re very active playing, and there are some ranged enemies to watch out for. Bit barebones, but still just fun to play now and then. Easy recommend for that kind of thing.
Also working on the new character unlock for BlazBlue Entropy Effect. It’s unfortunately tied to the mainline story progress which I didn’t really care for and haven’t put much effort into since it was reset after early access ended. So I guess I have to straighten that out to play with the new character. Did get a very strong loadout option where I start with a seemingly pretty killer combination upgrade and one of its two prerequisites. In BBEE, when your run ends, your character gets added to a support pool along with a couple of the build upgrades you used, and when you start a run, you choose one main character and add two supports to get your initial loadout. So, if I setup another character to bring the other prerequisite as their support, I can combine the two to have that all going right from run start on any other character, which is pretty neat. Not the best player-driven metaprogression system I’ve seen, but player-driven metaprogression still a very unusual and rich idea that adds a lot to a game, even in this limited form. I hope some more games pick up on this kind of thing, so we can see the ideas grow and metaprogression become a more interesting thing. Characters play pretty interestingly and vary nicely, but the enemy side is pretty weak and the surrounding aspects are tedious to clunky, so only a mild recommend here :)
Hoping to see Greyskin in the NextFest this week. If you like a top-down shooter ARPG type thing, check that game out, because it’s got a lot of stuff in it, and they indicated before that this Nextfest was part of their release plan, so hopefully we’re getting closer to more than a demo.
but early access was made so small teams (or solo devs) can not starve while working on a passion project.
It was not. As I said, Valve specifically warns devs in their info docs not to use early access for the money, because it won’t profit. And that’s incredibly obvious to pretty much anyone given how hard it is for any released game to get attention on Steam, and that most people do–and should–avoid buying early access games. Early access money is a small slice of nothing.
Yes, some devs still do it for money, despite all the evidence otherwise, but devs that go early access because they actually need the money to finish the game almost always fail their project, because that’s just a disastrously bad management choice.
Early access was created for feedback and hype/community building. Being in early access for a year gives you 12 months paid testing/feedback and invested players already there on launch day for Steam metrics to count, 12mo of organic social media growth plus chances to catch some actual influencers and whatnot, etc. You’d never see that just dropping the game on release day, without a ton more money in advertisement. Early access is to give a game a chance for the most positive launch day it can manage, if devs make their customers happy and fix bugs.
A project that needs early access money has already failed.
So, when a game releases, buyers get the option to partially refund or commit, and valve uses the commit money to pay the refunds, so devs only make money if they keep more than half of their buyers, and customers have to consciously deal with sinking money into a potentially failed project.
At least right now the abandoned games are still labelled early access.
Most early access failures eventually just call themselves released at some point, so we’re no better off as far as that.
Not charging until the game properly releases is normal. Most devs need to manage and deal with that, and beta testing used to be an expense on the devs. Now, the buyers are paying the devs to beta test, taking the project risk for the devs. Even if the system were free to both sides, it’s still beneficial to the devs, but without the corruption of thinking they should be making money during beta testing–money that they’ll happily keep as they walk away if their project fails to deliver what they sold.
There’s a more fair solution out there than letting devs just sell their games before they finish.
Which is fair. Most people should not buy early access, and should wait for the devs to declare their project release ready. Early access buying is all risk and responsibility (to post feedback, to update Steam review if it’s out of date withe the project, to understand the individual project’s development pace, etc), with a lot of factors a buyer should take into account, that most people genuinely should not need to care about or wait for.
There are an insane number of Steam games already released to buy and play.
I follow lots of early access devs, and it’s not uncommon for some devs to blatantly post updates only strategically, fixing some minor thing as the next seasonal Steam sale approaches. Some continue even after leaving early access: serious issues in bug report threads, but some minor fix gets posted as the sale approaches, clearly to make the game look alive, even though none of the big stuff is getting fixed.
Plenty of devs are their own business side, anymore.
Like I’ve seen games that are in “early access” for years.
Games take years to build, especially when you are changing your design from feedback and improving the game. Some games come to early access intending to change little and just finish the game, while others come to get ideas and reshape the project as it moves along. Many EA projects are also indies with small teams, or even just one dev plugging along on their own, not even full time.
Of course there are bad actors, and devs who made mistakes (like thinking early access would fund development–even Valve tells devs not to do that, but there are always optimists thinking EA is for sales, and then they run out of money), but there are many ways to do every early access, and you have to look at each project to see what it looks like it’s doing, how much and how often it posts updates, etc.
8/10 for a shell of a game, gutted of significant single player modes from the VF5 series (like VF5’s quest, and VF5FS’s licenses), plus only porting some of the customization options, even though VF created fighter customization.
VF5 has become less every installment, and it’s sad this is all that’s left to limp onto PC, still praying that such basic online fighting can be the only thing that actually matters and should earn them a pass on how much of the game they’ve cut.
I wish companies could do genuinely good things like release big games on more platforms, without everyone’s response being hand-wringing about what bad things it might mean for their own hardware.
Especially when it’s Microsoft, whose Xbox platform already extends into this tiny other thing people might have heard of, called Windows… I think they’ll be ok, somehow.
I’m more interested in this being FH5, which is just switching into a kind of maintenance mode, where weekly activity playlists repeat instead of doing new things, and both of those before there’s even talk about FH6. Adding significant new players to FH5 now seems an interesting choice.
However, the reality is that most gamers are now using gear that has some ray-tracing capability.
Sure, plenty, and I’m still going to hard-pass any idiot game that forces raytracing or upscaling. Find something actually useful to do with the power available, instead of something that worthless and computationally wasteful, or don’t and run at lower power. That’s more valuable than raytracing.
Seems like a strange problem. I’d suggest playing more different games, and focusing on getting your hands in tune with the specific game rather than the type of game or perspective, and being more aggressive about remapping controls to fit how you want to play.
I switch games a lot and don’t generally have issues settling into a game just because its controls are off from another game, but if a dev puts something common somewhere weird, I’m absolutely going to move it to one of the places I expect it to be.
It’s more that many keep Origin because the EA App is so much more of a problem.
Generally the control im talking about is whether or not I can continue to play the game.
Obviously, and I’m saying that’s an extremely small amount of control, for which you give up a lot of other control to have.
“Straightforward” or not, it’s well-trod territory, and devs don’t do their homework on a doing a good job before putting games out. I don’t just mean absurdly basic niceties like rebinding (which is frankly only difficult if your game input is built wrong), but mechanics like deadzones, trigger response handling, aim reticle behavior, and so on. All these are things I frequently need to adjust from outside of games, because we simply can’t rely on developers to do quality work, nor to correct things afterward. Building new input schemes is also occasionally useful, eg Curse of the Dead Gods used a dumb weapon switching mechanic on controller, but I was able to build a more reasonable swap-button mechanic on top of it, and share it so anyone else running through Steam can load that config to play that way. It’d be nicer if devs listened and did it themselves, but they couldn’t be bothered, even though they already built the kbm input to work the right way.
I’ve had one Steam game delicensed the past ten years or so, and I got it replaced later. I couldn’t easily count the number of games I’ve changed in one way or another, but I’ve got a couple thousand hours playing controller in a game with no support whatsoever, so the control I have over my how games play seems a pretty big deal ;) Off-Steam, there was Ubisoft taking The Crew away from owners. How’s your physical copy of that running for you? Oh, right, it doesn’t run for anyone, at least aside from PC people working on modding in replacement servers.
I’m just saying, there’s a lot more to it all than “game runs”.
It’s funny to talk about “keeping control” because you can put a disk in a device that completely locks down every aspect of the game environment. PC offers generally way more control over games, allows more games, etc.
And there’s GOG to buy from if one doesn’t want Steam’s potential ability to delicense a purchase, but I’d be playing games through Steam either way because of it’s ability to tweak and rebuild controller handling for each game. I’m picky and a lot of game devs are sloppy about how they handle controllers, so having that extra control over the experience is a major plus to me.
Doubling down on not finding anything because you’re not looking so there’s nothing worth looking for isn’t very compelling. 2024 wasn’t as strong a showing as 2023, but Exhuma, Cuckoo, It’s What’s Inside, and Krazy House say it’s not a full dud either.
Seems your eye doesn’t see very far.
Note: Haven’t seen Nosferatu or Smile 2 yet. Also, I’ve seen some call You’ll Never Find Me as a 2024 movie. If one includes that, it goes very high on our list.
It’s too short for most games I play, because they backload their interest and gameplay excessively. The first two hours are generally the worst example of the actual game. Frustrates me that devs don’t have the sense to make a demo that showcases the game instead of either nothing or just the beginning, but if a dev does the beginning and lets you carry your save into the full game, you can use the demo as intro and then buy with two more hours to put it through its paces (or already know you won’t need to refund). Still not a smart way to sell your game when the early game is worse and a more focused demo would more effectively and efficiently engage potential players who don’t want to sink time into every demo, but it’s a compromise solution for people who will spend time with the demo and not wander away without buying into the game if they had a good time.
Also, anything with a character creator or other such lengthy setup to get playing just doesn’t work with only two hours of running time as the window.