Jimquisition: Early Access

[proghead]

And Jim Sterling shows yet again that he's got his finger on the pulse of gaming. Congratulations, sir.

On the issue, I wholeheartedly agree. During the last Steam sale, I instantly skipped anything with an "Early Access" stamp on it. My time is limited, so I don't spend it on unfinished games. But the question one has to ask is probably: "How early is too early". That's hard to say and even has to be done on a per-game basis. Word of mouth is most important here, but there's still always too much room to abuse this system.

Early Access games should be "pay what you want": It's not finished yet, so pay what you think the currently available state is worth. Then when the game has been finished, you pay a small amount to unlock the full version, and from then on new buyers pay the ordinary full price, which is higher than the unlocking price. That'd be fair IMHO.

In terms of how to review them: there should be no scores attached. They should be handled like previews.

 

[Elberik]

Regarding Minecraft's model: You could buy the beta for about $13 (I believe) but now if you buy the finished product it's $20. Sometimes on Kickstarter there will be a limited number of digital copies at $15 & then an infinite number at $25, incentivizing people to contribute sooner. I understand that some treat the "early access" as a sort of pre-order & that's fine. But Jim is correct in saying that the popularity of this business model creates a new avenue for consumer exploitation. It could lead to a new understanding of "abandon-ware"

 

[Mangue Surfer]

Whem you buy a game this early, you are in fact, founding the project. Yes you are paying for an idea, yes you will be a tester and no, this isn't new. This sort of thing exist a long time ago whem the indie games are know as community games.

 

[Elberik]

You don't pay for the Jimquisition.

Sorry Jim, I do, via The Escapist Pub Club subscription. And others pay via being exposed to advertisers. Just because you don't charge money directly per episode, doesn't mean people aren't paying for it by other means.

Sorry Mr. Clever, The Jimquisition is not Pub Club exclusive. It's free content.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

Sorry Mr. Clever, The Jimquisition is not Pub Club exclusive. It's free content.

If it's free, then what are the ads for? Anything carrying advertising technically isn't free. So it's not just Pub Club members who are paying.

And I didn't pay for the Pub Club for exclusives, but rather to support The Escapist in general, and to get rid of advertising. So, sorry, the shows that I watch like The Jimquisition are exactly why I subscribe to The Escapist. I don't think I've ever even seen anything on the site that was Pub Club exclusive.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

Also gta 5 was never early access, that was just an incomplete release, the difference being that an early access title at least outright tells you it is incomplete while you're in for a happy surprise with the incomplete release if you didn't read reviews.

I think that GTA 5 is a really poor example. I think the delay of the multiplayer launch was perfectly valid, and I think it was deliberately delayed for good reasons, not because they needed to finish development.

Everybody knew that GTA V was going to be a massive release. Sony and Microsoft's servers would have taken a pretty significant beating from just the single-player version being downloaded en masse. Imagine if everybody had also been immediately jumping into multiplayer mode? They would have been absolutely hammered.

Aside from the technical reasons, it's also good from a gaming perspective, to give people a chance to play the story and try the game out before being pressured into playing multiplayer.

 

[UsefulPlayer 1]

Is the point of this episode not to buy early access games that are bad?
Pretty basic point to me.

Isn't early access much better than Kickstarter? Atleast you get some product along with the promises. People seem to throw money at that.

I feel like I do pay for Jimquisition. I sit through the god awful commercials that seem to plague this site more and more. And I think other people pay to have the commercials removed.

 

[Amir Kondori]

If an indie studio is working on a game I find interesting I will 100% considering buying it early access. I would put my money down with the hope that the game gets made into something I really like but with the knowledge that it may not.

As long as a developer is up front about it I don't mind one bit. Now a AAA game, where there is a large development team and a large publisher backing it, hell no, they have the money to cover development themselves.

EDIT: The only early access game I have bought so far, Starbound, is already enough game for me to me feel like I MORE than got my money's worth. Nobody complained when Notch did it, of course he didn't call it early access, he just did early access.

 

[Elberik]

Sorry Mr. Clever, The Jimquisition is not Pub Club exclusive. It's free content.

If it's free, then what are the ads for? Anything carrying advertising technically isn't free. So it's not just Pub Club members who are paying.

If you think you are deserving of infinite entertainment at no personal cost to you then just use adblocker like everyone else & stop acting like you're somehow entitled to free content. Honestly your argument has no moral ground.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

I feel like I do pay for Jimquisition. I sit through the god awful commercials that seem to plague this site more and more. And I think other people pay to have the commercials removed.

I also feel that "I'm immune from criticism because it's free" is a terrible argument, and one that Jim wouldn't put up with in other contexts. In fact, hasn't Jim done episodes bemoaning "free to play" games?

"Oh sure, our games are crippled to try to get you to buy in-game DLC - but you don't have to pay, so how can you criticise our game?"

 

[Elberik]

It didn't start with Minecraft, it started with Windows.

Except not.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

If you think you are deserving of infinite entertainment at no personal cost to you then just use adblocker like everyone else & stop acting like you're somehow entitled to free content. Honestly your argument has no moral ground.

Wait, when did I ever say that? I said I do pay for The Escapist content via a Pub Club subscription, and others pay via ads. In fact, I wish more sites would offer subscription instead of advertising. I claimed no entitlement to free anything.

You were the one claiming that it was "free content" - I was pointing out that there is a cost, and calling it free is misleading. You seem to have totally changed your argument.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

I can more or less forgive indies for subscribing to the Early Access philosophy, because it allows them to turn their first round of players into playtesters. All they need to do is set the client to send reports automatically or otherwise ask the players if they can data-mine the game's files in case of a crash or instability issue. That's not all that bad, considering how I doubt everyone rolls in Mojang-sized bank and has the means to furnish a decent QA department. Sacrifices have to be made if you're part of a small team.

What I can't forgive, however, is stuff like Planetary Annihilation, on Steam. An indie game, one with no prior track record on its devs and nothing but its own super-ambitious design tenets to hold it together, marketed as an Early Access game - for ninety freaking bucks.

Ninety dollars. You can fuck right off, if that's what you're going to try and pass off as an Early Access product: something that feels like a cross between a light RTS and Spore and that objectively shouldn't warrant this kind of obscene price tag.

I also can't forgive things like Day One, DayZ's current state, or 100 Ways to Die. There's Early Access, and then there's expecting players to slog through a gimped version of your product because you haven't bothered to work on a Crouching feature before packing your late Beta off and onto Greenlight.

There's also a point where Early Access really feels like you're being given free keys to the candy store, while being vaguely aware that the game pushing out its final build would mean you'd lose your Cash Shop privileges. Mechwarrior Online felt rather egregious in this aspect, to the point where I just can't bring myself to play it again. It's a business model that, I feel, goes swimmingly well with Freemium à la Candy Crush.

 

[Elberik]

If you think you are deserving of infinite entertainment at no personal cost to you then just use adblocker like everyone else & stop acting like you're somehow entitled to free content. Honestly your argument has no moral ground.

Wait, when did I ever say that? I said I do pay for The Escapist content via a Pub Club subscription, and others pay via ads. In fact, I wish more sites would offer subscription instead of advertising. I claimed no entitlement to free anything.

You were the one claiming that it was "free content" - I was pointing out that there is a cost, and calling it free is misleading. You seem to have totally changed your argument.

No. I took your language to mean that you disagreed with the Escapist's use of adspace & subscriptions. If I assumed too much then I apologize. But the fact remains that I can navigate through most of the Escapist's website without paying a dime (with or without adblocker). I believe that classifies it as "free".

Now, if your argument is that every second of your life has monetary value and that watching a 30sec ad or clicking past a popup counts as "paying" then that's a different discussion altogether.

 

[Sotanaht]

I'm a bit conflicted about steam early access myself. On the one hand I like that indies are getting some actual funding to make the games with this way and hopefully can turn out some somewhat decent niche titles. The main drawback that I see isn't so much about putting out or paying for an unfinished game, but that many of these games will NEVER finish. They are going to linger in early access alpha with new and often half baked ideas constantly thrown in and then left half done forever, and I think that because of this we are going to see a lot less titles that actually feel complete and well designed. The ones that do "officially" leave the alpha/beta stage do so with practically no change in the development model and almost completely under the radar to the point that you probably won't even know the beta has ended even if you own the game already.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

No. I took your language to mean that you disagreed with the Escapist's use of adspace & subscriptions. If I assumed too much then I apologize. But the fact remains that I can navigate through most of the Escapist's website without paying a dime (with or without adblocker). I believe that classifies it as "free".

I think that this misperception has been highly damaging to online media. Just look at the mobile app and gaming space, for example. So many App Store reviews will crap all over very decent, honest games if they aren't free, or cost more than a dollar. Such is the culture that has developed that so many consider anything online should be free.

(And the irony is that many of these same people will happily spend $5 on a coffee, or a crappy fast food meal, which doesn't require skilled programmers and a high development budget to create.)

And games aren't cheap to develop. Somebody has to pay those programmers. And of course, the big fad is "free to play" with micro transactions in games - and publishers have worked out the psychology behind that, so that the "free" games end up costing more if you want to get any sort of enjoyment or longevity out of them.

So, people end up paying $20 to hundreds of dollars in DLC and micro transactions for the "free" game, while they could have bought a decent, honest game with no ads and no micro transactions for between $5 and $20. Yet the honest developer is harmed, because apparently charging up-front for something is a crime against humanity.

Yeah, so calling things "free" and "monetising" them by other revenue models is a real problem when it comes to a healthy content industry. Which is why I wish more people saw the costs, rather than the smoke and mirrors that are put there.

Now, if your argument is that every second of your life has monetary value that that watching a 30sec ad or clicking past a popup counts as "paying" then that's a different discussion altogether.

It's not just time, it's quality of life and attention. It's not so much that every second I would be earning money, but I already have enough distractions. And we only have a certain number of hours a day to pay attention to things. So, I'd rather not spend my time looking at ads.

But really, when it comes down to it, is that advertisers pay for those ads to be placed. So the advertisers obviously think it's worth their money to pay for your attention. And the content makers use the advertising money to fund content creation. None of that would work if there wasn't a viewer to look at the ads. So, ultimately, it's not what you or I consider our time and attention to be worth - it's what the site is able to sell our time and attention to advertisers for.

So, no, I wouldn't consider advertising-driven content to be "free" because the market is clearly putting a value on our attention, and that attention is being sold to advertisers.

 

[Elberik]

*snip*

I wouldn't consider advertising-driven content to be "free" because the market is clearly putting a value on our attention, and that attention is being sold to advertisers.

So when you initially chastised Jim for calling his video "free" you were saying that it (the video) had a monetary value even though you (the viewer) could see it without having to pay* for it?

*I know you pay the Pub Club subscription but you did not have to directly pay $0.99 to watch the video.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

So when you initially chastised Jim for calling his video "free" you were saying that it (the video) had a monetary value even though you (the viewer) could see it without having to pay* for it?

Well, yes.

*I know you pay the Pub Club subscription but you did not have to directly pay $0.99 to watch the video.

But The Escapist doesn't sell individual shows and articles separately. It's a package deal, much like Cable TV, where you pay for a bunch of channels, some you may watch all the time, and some you may never watch.

I have a hunch that Zero Punctuation, Loading Ready Run and The Jimquisition are fairly "high value" assets to The Escapist, given that they likely drive most of the traffic to the site (I obviously don't have web traffic data, though). For me, Zero Punctuation and Extra Credits were the main reasons I took out a subscription. I would guess that Yahtzee drives a ton of revenue, both directly from here, and via the YouTube channel.

If anything, the advertising model does work on a "per episode" basis. But subscriptions help maintain a baseline for keeping the site running.

 

[Elberik]

So when you initially chastised Jim for calling his video "free" you were saying that it (the video) had a monetary value even though you (the viewer) could see it without having to pay* for it?

Well, yes.

*I know you pay the Pub Club subscription but you did not have to directly pay $0.99 to watch the video.

But The Escapist doesn't sell individual shows and articles separately. It's a package deal, much like Cable TV, where you pay for a bunch of channels, some you may watch all the time, and some you may never watch.

I have a hunch that Zero Punctuation, Loading Ready Run and The Jimquisition are fairly "high value" assets to The Escapist, given that they likely drive most of the traffic to the site (I obviously don't have web traffic data, though). For me, Zero Punctuation and Extra Credits were the main reasons I took out a subscription. I would guess that Yahtzee drives a ton of revenue, both directly from here, and via the YouTube channel.

If anything, the advertising model does work on a "per episode" basis. But subscriptions help maintain a baseline for keeping the site running.

Wow, that went well. Nice talking to you.

 

[Pigeon_Grenade]

On the One hand- i can see Early access as a means of a Small Company Getting a Product out there and allowing the people that would buy the game to help Shape it and get the cash to finish the game in full, on the other hand you still have to be careful Where you put your faith in how a Project is actually doing- in the case of Steam there are places on it to ask Questions and get answers to how a Dev is actualy coming along in the project.