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[Persus13]

The problem with the arguments I see here is that I've never had the impression that Star Drive and Star Drive 2 were financially unsuccessful. There's a lot of indie games that I see with maybe a dozen steam reviews. Star Drive and Star Drive 2 have reviews in the thousands, so assuming only 1 in 10 buyers gave it a review, that's a decent amount of sales for an indie game.

The Toady comparison is also not great for another reason, which is that Toady is fairly open on what he's working on, while the dev for Star Drive and Star Drive 2 is not. Generally devs who are open about what they're dealing with earn a lot more goodwill with gamers, and I think that the dev's silence had the opposite effect here.

Finally, Star Drive and Star Drive 2 were never early access games. They were released as fully finished games on Steam.

Since I've never played them, I can't make the call whether the bugs are game-breaking. But one of the reasons I haven't picked Star Drive 2 up in a sale has been the fact that it isn't being actively worked on.

[Wiles]

Starpoint Gemini: Warlords is 66% off on steam. Anyone have an opinion on it? It looks promising and seems fairly well received.

[LoSboccacc]

Nor is Toady selling any games.

If someone offers to build you a house, you pay them and end up with a shed, I think you have the right to be a bit disappointed.

well that's why you put an appropriate amount of research in the building company, it's a very real risk and your money is on the line and things can still go belly up even if they're reputable. now I don't expect to have to put down the same amount of research before giving some random off internet five bucks, but I went here with precisely this question, people knew dev had a high rate of abandonment, crisis adverted, everyone's happy.

[Darkmere]

Starpoint Gemini: Warlords is 66% off on steam. Anyone have an opinion on it? It looks promising and seems fairly well received.

The first game had the single best space combat interface for mouse and keyboard that I've ever seen. It was a joy to play.

The story was awful and the "bad guy" sandbox mode was woefully unfinished. I have the second one on my wish list but I'm not ready to buy it yet. I assume it would be fairly similar.

[Parsely]

I'll defend selling unfinished games.

Keep in mind you're hanging out on a forum dedicated to the ultimate early access project.  Toady's been making a living off an unfinished product for many years.  It's kind of ironic to complain about early access here.

As mentioned, game development is a major investment.  A team can either fit the project into their free time over a fuckhuge period on their personally funded equipment, and honestly most such projects will die before anyone sees anything, finished or not.  Or they can offer early access to sustain more focused development and ride that out as long as they can.  Don't assume these are people who are just trying to cheat you out of money by half-assing and then abandoning an effort at something.  May be the case sometimes, but I'm sure it isn't always.

I don't mind early access offerings.  If it's more than a few $, I'll put research into the game before I buy it.  How excited am I by the concept?  What's the current state and pace of development?  How involved are the devs with their community and its feedback?  If I fail to ask these questions first, it was my own fault.  I've enjoyed many unfinished games, and I like that there are easy ways now to get something in return while directly investing in expanding game development beyond established, successful studios.  I'm pretty sure the early access route churns out many more seasoned developers than unfunded basement projects that never see the light of day.

If you just can't shake the sense of entitlement that every time you ever spend money it should be like buying off a shelf in a retail store, then just stay away from early access.  And blame capitalism for its absurd incentives that forces people to choose between pursuing a goal through less than ideal methods that might piss some people off or not pursuing it at all.

Well said!

[hector13]

Nor is Toady selling any games.

If someone offers to build you a house, you pay them and end up with a shed, I think you have the right to be a bit disappointed.

well that's why you put an appropriate amount of research in the building company, it's a very real risk and your money is on the line and things can still go belly up even if they're reputable. now I don't expect to have to put down the same amount of research before giving some random off internet five bucks, but I went here with precisely this question, people knew dev had a high rate of abandonment, crisis adverted, everyone's happy.

Apart from the people who have a shed

I'm railing more against the concept of selling early access. There isn't really any other media in which you can sell an unfinished product to consumers with the expectation that it's going to be finished later, and it's actually acceptable to then say "well, you know what, this is shit I'm going to stop" prior to that later and the only bad thing happening to you being you get a reputation for being a bit flaky.

[Paul]

It happens in service industries all the time. People pay for a product up front and then wait for it to be delivered.

For instance, I've been doing web design professionally for a few years now and it's rampant. One of my clients ended up hiring me to fix his website after he paid another company $3000 for a "cutting edge custom Wordpress theme." What they delivered was a site using an old unregistered copy of a premium theme with the registry guts ripped out and a bunch of modifications done to make it look like the client wanted. But it was using a bunch of deprecated functions with the errors hidden even when the company developed it (old theme version), so the next big Wordpress update broke their whole site. To add insult to injury, $1000 of the $3000 was for SEO. Their idea of SEO was to pack the site full of meta keywords which didn't even exist in any of the content (and if you know anything about SEO, you know that practice died years ago and is ignored and can even be penalized as keyword stuffing by search engines now). The best part? They forgot to turn the site's noindex off, so Google wasn't indexing them at all anyway.

Another example: When I and my wife were married, we hired a professional wedding venue. They had all these beautiful photos and videos of weddings done there and it looked beautiful. But their service was atrocious - they completely botched our music and we never had any music playing even for the walk down the aisle, they pushed our wedding party to the front without the rehearsed walk so the only one walking down the aisle was my wife, and the guy (who wore a suit when we met, but showed up to the wedding in a dirty t-shirt and jeans) photo bombed every single one of our photos. Including our walk out of the venue with guests throwing rice - he was in the back holding two big black trash bags pushing through the door behind us. And they rushed us up the entire time and pushed us out the door early because they had double booked.

Now in both cases the client could probably sue and be awarded most if not all of the fee back, but most people don't do that. We found out later that the wedding venue had been specifically deleting their online business listings because of repeated poor reviews. If a bunch of people got together and sued the game dev studio in a class action they could probably win, but it wouldn't ever happen because #1 nobody wants to organize that over a few bucks they paid for a game and #2 they probably wouldn't even get enough to cover lawyer expenses and the dev studio would just declare bankruptcy (unless they didn't properly do the LLC, in which case they might get some of their personal assets - but we're talking about the average indie game dev who has little to no assets).

[SalmonGod]

I don't know anything about the Star Drive devs.  Maybe they are sleezy game devs, and deserve whatever negative perceptions they get.  I'm well aware they're out there.  If the games were openly understood to be unfinished, but being sold without the early access labeling, then that's quite shitty.

Which also makes it irrelevant to all the stuff I said before, which I stand by.  There's nothing wrong with selling an unfinished product, if the nature of it is communicated openly enough that buyers who make an uninformed decision do so out of their own carelessness.

[umiman]

Fanatical (formerly Bundlestars) sent me an email saying Lethal League was free on the site now. Maybe you guys can get it too.

It's a fun, simple but complex fighting game. You basically shoot balls at each other.

[milo christiansen]

It shows up as being $13 for me

[umiman]

It shows up as being $13 for me

Probably a targeted email campaign then, sadly.

[Gabeux]

Starpoint Gemini: Warlords is 66% off on steam. Anyone have an opinion on it? It looks promising and seems fairly well received.

It's a 7/10 for me, but I'm really critical of such games since it's the genre I most play.
It has the expected freedom of choice from space sim games, like picking which missions to fly and how combat-oriented they are, or you could focus on trade or exploring/mining and so on. You can also board/take enemy ships and sell it / keep it to yourself / add it to your fleet / scuttle it for resources, which is a feature I love in any sandbox space games.
You can kind of build up your empire later on, and have a fleet to support you...I didn't play a whole lot when I got there, but it felt a little grindy and sometimes a bit boring, because the world is way too 'generated out of thin air' instead of simulated IMO.

Definitely worth a try or at least checking some videos. My experience with it might have been a little grindy because I was grinding all skills related to ship capture, and that can take a while.

[Reelya]

I have these spare gift keys now:

- Killing Floor
- Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location
- Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure Sold to the gentleman with the rad socks

Visual novels:
- KARAKARA
- Fault milestone one and Fault milestone two side:above

[Reyn]

Fanatical sent out free keys for the game Lethal league. One for you, one for your friend.

Click to get the key via fanatical. You probably need an account on their site to get it.

[Flying Dice]

Stellaris is 60% off, Leviathans and Utopia DLCs are 50%, this weekend only.