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[GiglameshDespair]

Is War of the Human Tanks worth the $4 it's on sale for? It's pushing my Advance Wars nostalgia buttons, and the premise of

story driven strategy game with a gameplay reminiscent of Battleship and Chess, featuring a story of war, loyalty, sacrifice and human shaped tanks

combined with dark humor and cheerful suicide-bombers instead of War Is Bad anvils sounds fun.

I think it has a demo, so you might be able to give it a go.

[BurnedToast]

+1 to the fail-to-finish woes that Early Access breeds. Every one I've bought has been a failure, so at this point I'm waiting on proof that a product can finish. The fact that all the ones I semi-watch for the past couple years haven't made release despite being "finished enough to sell" really gives a bad name to the entire process for me.

Someone posted a link a while back to a website that data mined a ton of steam profiles to try and get an idea of sales numbers and such.

One thing that stood out to me is that early access titles have a huge spike when they are first put on steam (like all titles)..... and almost no spike when they are actually released.

I already suspected something like that was true, it goes a long way to explaining why EA games are rarely finished, or if they do finish it's still in a mostly broken beta state with a finished label attached. If you've already made 90% of the money for 50% (or less..) of the work, there's not much incentive to do the other 50%.

I suspect more developers are going to realize that and do the math, and the EA situation will get even worse. Maybe customers will stop buying them after a while, or maybe not.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, someone linked an article a while ago about how, regardless of whether a game has EA or not, there's effectively only one Steam launch.

On the one hand, this means that there's a certain capacity for shovelware. On the other, devs that are interested in making a popular/good game, or in achieving maximum profit as opposed to a quick cash grab, they're probably going to be more reluctant to do EA, because you're effectively launching with an underpriced half-complete game, which presumably reduces the early spike of sales most games have at their release, in addition to potentially reducing later sales if something is buggy or takes a long time to be finished/fixed.

[nenjin]

More it's just this: you spend the hype early in EA and you don't get as much back on it. "Yeah it's good but there's no content" doesn't leave the
same word of mouth impression as "OMFG."

We've been trained as gamers for so long to hype on a release, when the EA release is simply something we won't play....most effectively just wait on a sale, rather than go through the "Ok, how did it do in EA? Does it have all the content?" That's not hype buying, that's informed buying, which takes work on the user's end.

The maxim for players on EA has been "Don't buy it if you don't like an unfinished game", whereas the maxim for developers seem to be evolving into "don't release it unless you can stand by it as fun right now, no equivocation."

[Sappho]

I keep confusing the "EA" acronym as it relates to early access with EA, the publisher.

I only just this moment realized you guys weren't talking about the publisher. So much confusion has finally been cleared up...

[Sergius]

Let's change it to e.a.

[Toaster]

Evil EA and Risky EA.

[Graknorke]

the maxim for developers seem to be evolving into "don't release it unless you can stand by it as fun right now, no equivocation."

30fps lock, absolute shite optimisiation, and no review copies sent out, probably to hide the fact.
That doesn't sound like fun to me.

[Persus13]

the maxim for developers seem to be evolving into "don't release it unless you can stand by it as fun right now, no equivocation."

30fps lock, absolute shite optimisiation, and no review copies sent out, probably to hide the fact.
That doesn't sound like fun to me.

I can't tell if you're are being serious or not.

A random question, what is with gamers being obsessed with FPS? As someone who had stop-motion as a hobby for a while, I'm used to 15 FPS being the norm, with 24 FPS being something that was good if you could pull it off without it looking too weird and had the time for it. In fact there were some people who were pretty elitist about using 24 FPS. I suppose video games need to be smoother than films or animation, but how much of a difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS is there and how much does it actually make a difference in games? Does it matter more for certain genres or what?

[Teneb]

the maxim for developers seem to be evolving into "don't release it unless you can stand by it as fun right now, no equivocation."

30fps lock, absolute shite optimisiation, and no review copies sent out, probably to hide the fact.
That doesn't sound like fun to me.

I can't tell if you're are being serious or not.

A random question, what is with gamers being obsessed with FPS? As someone who had stop-motion as a hobby for a while, I'm used to 15 FPS being the norm, with 24 FPS being something that was good if you could pull it off without it looking too weird and had the time for it. In fact there were some people who were pretty elitist about using 24 FPS. I suppose video games need to be smoother than films or animation, but how much of a difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS is there and how much does it actually make a difference in games? Does it matter more for certain genres or what?

There is some difference, yes, and high fps can make quite the effect. Now that youtube allows for 60fps videos, I guess you could search for one and see it at both 30 and 60 to try and tell them apart. The main thing for me though, is that if it's at 60 and drops, you still get some pretty good performance, while if it's 30, it can be really noticeable and bad. First Person Shooters in general, as well as, I think, RTS's, are two genres that benefit a lot from high fps.

[Aslandus]

the maxim for developers seem to be evolving into "don't release it unless you can stand by it as fun right now, no equivocation."

30fps lock, absolute shite optimisiation, and no review copies sent out, probably to hide the fact.
That doesn't sound like fun to me.

I can't tell if you're are being serious or not.

A random question, what is with gamers being obsessed with FPS? As someone who had stop-motion as a hobby for a while, I'm used to 15 FPS being the norm, with 24 FPS being something that was good if you could pull it off without it looking too weird and had the time for it. In fact there were some people who were pretty elitist about using 24 FPS. I suppose video games need to be smoother than films or animation, but how much of a difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS is there and how much does it actually make a difference in games? Does it matter more for certain genres or what?

It matters a lot for games in a first person perspective and for games that require precision or reaction time... so a lot of games...

[WealthyRadish]

In games, framerate is usually tied to multiple aspects of gameplay as well as appearance. More than just how it looks, responsiveness to inputs usually suffers at low framerates like 30 fps, and when the visual experience and the inputs are so heavily tied together (unlike in film or other media that are fine at low framerate), it's important for movement/input to be as seamless as possible with the environment. On visuals alone the difference is enough for most people, but it's because of input and the nature of programming that 30 fps is often unacceptable. The algorithms and greater systems involved in generating and displaying game images are incredibly complex, and when these are also working in tandem with things like physics engines, framerate plays a huge role in whether it's able to come together smoothly and consistently.

[i2amroy]

For relaxed games the difference between 30 and 60 FPS is pretty slim (though most people can at least detect it, and for some it's very noticeable; every person is different after all). However it becomes especially noticeable in games that are more adrenaline inducing (such as first person shooters) because your body essentially runs everything in overdrive, making the difference much more noticeable. In truth once you get over about 60 FPS the changes start to become much and much less noticeable, even for more action-packed games, and by the time you reach 120 the vast majority of people are unable to notice any significant differences (though things like virtual reality headsets often need to push even higher due to the direct linking between our what we see and what our bodies are doing).

Additionally, as people have noted, many games run input FPS along with their graphical FPS. It's not as common nowdays since you usually are running your graphics threads on a totally different part of your hardware from the ones that are handling user input, but in those older periods when they were commonly linked lower FPS settings would lead to unresponsive or "jerky" controls.

[Persus13]

Thanks so much, that was really helpful.

[nenjin]

the maxim for developers seem to be evolving into "don't release it unless you can stand by it as fun right now, no equivocation."

30fps lock, absolute shite optimisiation, and no review copies sent out, probably to hide the fact.
That doesn't sound like fun to me.

Not sure why you went to performance from that statement. I guess it depends on how important performance is to you. An average of 50 FPS when I expect 60 won't ruin my experience. An average of 24 FPS when I expect 30 won't either.

What it has seemed to come down to is having an already complete game in place when you hit EA. You might almost say feature complete (as that article did.) It's hard to call any EA game feature complete because all of them are still implementing this or that feature....but you get the gist. Sunless Sea was feature complete when it first launched in EA. Darkest Dungeons was. Those are games that you can play the whole game experience, minus some supporting content like more of this and that, or QoL features, better lighting, an official ending, yadda yadda. Those are the ones that can get recommended to people and can keep an EA game selling as it adds more content and word of mouth continues to spread.

Lots of games though get their polished tech demo or prototype on EA and try to go from there, and those are the ones that leave people feeling cold about EA. You can't really recommend those. "Give them money up front if you can't wait to see what it looks like or you want to give them support" is about the best you can say of them. "Have fun for hours on end" is not.

Anyways, I think most devs are pretty honest. They realize trying to release only a micro slice of a game that's stable and trying to stand by that isn't going to win them any fans. It really comes down to whether a game is worth making money yet. Devs that jump the shark on getting paid, it shows pretty obviously in their work. And the ones that sweated and labored and went broke to the last second before hitting EA...well, it shows in their work too.