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[genmac]

Bummer, luckily this was on sale when I got it... a lot of the early access stuff never pans out.  Double Fine has removed the original feature list for spacebase from their website.  There just isn't much game here, maybe an hour or two of gameplay.

[Levi]

Sucks that they are a publisher now, it makes it harder to remember to avoid them.  I'll have to take escape goat 2 off my wishlist I think.

[Retropunch]

I do hate this kinda thing, but at least they're doing the reasonable thing and opening it to modding/source code.

Although I've not played it, I can imagine that even a basic balance mod might do wonders for it. Even relatively low content simulation games can be fun if they're well balanced (like Banished), and I imagine that someone will take up the torch at least for a little while.

[Vortex Rikers]

but any new content for the game will now be in your hands. We’re eager to see what people do with this game!

Burn. Pay me.

It's almost like DoubleFine is doing it's darnest to soil their reputation as fast as possible. Broken Age, a few other stinkers, now DF-9. You can only ride the coattails of your previous successes for so long before people get pissed. What kind of video game developer has more than half a dozen projects in active development? Even the big boys don't spread their resources that thin. Do they even want to develop any of them? Judging by how they're handing DF-9, ah well whatever.
I just don't want DoubleFine to become the next Molyneux. Before you know it you'll be subjected to videos of crying Schafer.

[Knight of Fools]

I guess that precludes me from buying any Double Fine early access games in the future. These business practices should not be supported.

Darn shame.

[Fikes]

I expected better out of DoubleFine(I don't even remember why) but I am not that surpised to see this. 1 out of 5 early access games bomb like this? Can you point to 4 that have been good games after finishing the early access cycle?

I have no problem with the general idea; EA or Kickstarter, or what ever. I think it is a completely reasonable funding method and has created some great games. I just do not understand at all why so many of them fail.

I also very much subscribe to the idea that you don't buy a game unless you like the current state of it, such as Factorio, Star Sector, and some other third one.

[Knight of Fools]

Can you point to 4 that have been good games after finishing the early access cycle?

I can point to several that have been good games and aren't even out of early access yet.

Prison Architect, Starbound, Kerbal Space Program, Project Zomboid, and Wasteland 2 (Which just got out of early access today, I think). All good games, some more polished and better funded than others, but still decent enough to play for a day or fifty if you've got a hankering for what it offers.

There's just as many disappointments with early access games as successes though, if not more. I just wasn't expecting this particular disappointment, even given Double Fine's recent trouble getting a good game out.

[BigD145]

Wasteland 2 is released, but will soon also rely on mods. Prison Architect gets updates once a month and each update is pretty big when getting to their ultimate goal. Introversion also has some damn fine games and they bail early on concepts doomed to failure. Starbound is going nowhere really really slooooowly. KSP has an update time largely limited by Unity. Unity is not that old and should have had 64bit support day/version one. The mods there are great but oh so many people love KSP and hate mods with a passion. There's a lot to do even with stock parts. I don't know Zomboid.

Spacebase is being dumped quite early. There's still a lot DoubleFine could do, but then again this all started as a two week "employee have some fun" code bash.

[Apokaladle]

Off the top of my head, there's also Magicite and UnEpic, which I got in Early Access and which have since been fully released. Don't Starve, Full Mojo Rampage, Drunken Robot Pornography, and State of Decay were good games that I got after full release. I tried to find a list of all early access games that have gotten a full release, at least in name, but I couldn't find anything comprehensive.

I can think of heaps of games I've gotten DRM free or through Desura that have subsequently been greenlit and had updated versions released on Steam. Vox is the only one that comes to mind that disappointed me, but I can't think of any that have been abandoned at the moment. It's entirely possible this is my biased perception, but it seems to me that games that go that route either fizzle away into nothingness fairly early or make it to a reasonable release.

I've been growing more disillusioned with early access for a while, but projects being abandoned wasn't really the reason. It's portrayed as being a way to support the devs, and of course on some level it is, but I feel more and more like it's a way to get impulse buys before anything else. In an age of gaming where gamers have a million games to choose from and a million reviews of a game at their fingertips, where indie games are often considered overpriced if they're over $10, where Steam sales and dirt-cheap bundles are the norm, it's understandable that devs need money and will give incentives to people to get them to buy their game. It makes sense that one of those incentives could be to play early versions. I just think that a fair number of devs go to early access too quickly.

You have one game that's got all the mechanics implemented and just needs balancing and bugfixing, another that's pretty rough but playable, a third that's fun when it works but severely buggy, and a fourth that's a title screen held up by hopes and dreams. It's a little harder to get good reviews for an early access game than a proper release, so you can't always tell the difference from outside, and you're already biased towards getting it because you've just seen the most amazing game idea you never knew you wanted. It's the reason part of me still craves Castle Story when I haven't pre-ordered Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. There's that instant gratification factor. That's definitely something I and other gamers should be wary of, but I do think that some devs realize that and take advantage of it a bit.

...wow, I'm tired. Hopefully this makes sense to someone other than me.

[Knight of Fools]

Hopefully this makes sense to someone other than me.

Preach it, brother.

[Sergius]

Spacebase is being dumped quite early. There's still a lot DoubleFine could do, but then again this all started as a two week "employee have some fun" code bash.

To be fair, they did charge for it as if it was an AAA finished title tho.

[genmac]

Spacebase is being dumped quite early. There's still a lot DoubleFine could do, but then again this all started as a two week "employee have some fun" code bash.

To be fair, they did charge for it as if it was an AAA finished title tho.

For real.  One of the big things that sucks about steam right now is half the featured titles leading to a page with that big blue "Early access" banner.  Most of them aren't even close to being playable for any amount of time

[chaoticag]

Even at that pricepoint though, the game was a bomb. Seeing the stats that was out with the 1.0 announcement, the peak amount of players was around 1,000 a few days post release. That's not a good sign, especially as that was the time it had the least features. Prison Architect and Rimworld seem to be doing strong still, but maybe the Base Manager gameplay genre... thing... is getting over-saturated now. If all this had to compete with was Gnomeria and Towns, we might be seeing it make it a few more updates down the line. Not sure if it'd ever have been a success, but I think I feel worse for grabbing planetary annihilation over this (though that mostly boils down to personal reasons with the multiplayer focused real-time strategy genre. If I stuck a few more hours in, I might know how to play it, but then I don't know anyone as bad as I am and interested in trying the game out to learn through play.)

[Retropunch]

Early access just keeps getting worse. I really wish Steam had better policies for what is allowed to be early access and what isn't.

In my mind, it should be only open to betas (in the sense that it's feature complete but still with a lot of balance issues/bugs) and not a glorified demo with big promises. I do feel that this will change in time as people keep on getting disappointed, but it might take some time.

[amjh]

If early access only allowed feature complete games, it would be completely pointless. It's meant for indies who have no other source of funding, to speed up development. Ideally it would be for games that eventually get finished anyway but get there much faster with the extra money, by hiring help or moving part-time developers to full time work.