Its "expensive" cause it can be...though when main stream big name games that are shallow and shitty go for $60+ on the regular I am not sure how $30 for a full game + early access to alpha/beta stages is exactly expensive.
Plus...as was ninja'd above...the main aim was to make it less available to everyone to avoid bad peer to peer reviews due to alpha state...
Lots of people dont understand that alpha means unfinished these days.
What is the current definition of alpha? I would argue that the definition of alpha is not absolute.
Ten years ago , alphas were distributed only to
PAID playtesters and maybe friends and family of the devs.
Betas were meant to be small scale public tests, and often time the beta testing would reside solely in the hands of the paid playtesters. Games were meant to be released finished,considering the limited ability to patch even in the early 2000s, so there was a lot more work "behind the scenes" than what we see today.
So, nowadays, consumers PAY to be alpha testers. Alpha can represent anything from a basic mock up tech demo with mock-up everything to a game that is 98% complete (like minecraft was). Any game released nowadays is unfinished - everything gets at least one or two patches after release. So , if a game 95% done is "finished", that means an alpha can be "finished".
Therefore, I choose to think of an alpha as buying a playable portion of a finished game. I think it should be priced and judged relative to amount of content it has compared to other games - "finished" or "unfinished" in it's niche.
$30 is a high price point for this game.
Reasons why :
1) Graphics are placeholder quality. GUI is above average but still needs some work. I really doubt they will improve basic graphics beyond where they are now... they've never really said it's much of a priority, at all. There are thousands of games on google play/itunes for <$5 with much better graphics and polish.
Not to mention a lot , lot more indie games for cheap with fantastic graphics. I specifically have Vessel in my mind when I'm thinking of this.
2) The first PA demo was displayed at a gaming convention, and the public was allowed to play it. A casual google search reveals the first gameplay video was in Nov 2011... so what the public is seeing now is a game with a year of development. We can consider the 11/11 version to be the true "alpha" - and I am not impressed by differences between what we currently have , and what is released now.
So, in my estimation of this being a game development cycle of 3 years, this should be worth 1/3 of the final value. I put the final value at around $40 maximum, so this "alpha" should be priced at no more than $13.50. I can tell you one thing - with the current amount of well funded games coming out from the kickstarter frenzies of lately, PA will be irrelevant if they can't launch in a timely manner.
3) There are serious holes in the game play experience. Prisoners with no history, no differentiating personalities, and no release date. Seriously - why hasn't this been prioritized? Why is fog of war more important than this? That's like playing dwarf fortress without the ability to mine. What happened to getting core gameplay in place and working first?
4) I think Introversion is getting greedy. 99% of people reading this post is just going to dismiss this claim, but if you want to do your own research, you can start here. Keep in mind it's two people, they've earned several hundred thousand dollars so far off their alpha.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/10/31/prison-architect-introversion-console-microsoft-sony/Once again, I am making my evaluation on this game not for it's potential - which everyone readily admits is unknown - but from my evaluation of where it stands today after ~1 year of development, and a SOLID amount of funding from the community. I judge it very harshly against other alphas, such as Towns or even Survivors of Ragnarok, which are priced at much more reasonable levels.
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Topic: Prison Architect - Version 2.0 Release | It's over! *weeping* (Read 247489 times)