nesbitto said:
Why are gamers willing to put up with purchasing unfinished products?
Well, I've bought a few Early Access games:
Grim Dawn,
Nekro,
Invisible, Inc., and
Divinity: Original Sin. I'm pretty seriously considering buying
Darkest Dungeon as well.
Why?
I want to support those developers with their ideas. I haven't really played any of the games (except
Original Sin because it actually came out of Early Access), but in all cases what they had already released was a solid product that showed a lot of promise to become something even greater than it was. In one case (
Invisible, Inc.) there's also the fact that the developer has done an Early Access game in the past (
Don't Starve) with some pretty fantastic results as well as regular full releases, so it doesn't seem like much of a gamble in the first place.
None of that means I'm guaranteed to ever get a full game, sure, but the sentiment matters just as much to me. These are games that are trying to do new things with established mechanics or bring back mechanics that fell by the wayside when big publishers suddenly decided that nobody wanted them anymore. That's something I want to support.
I haven't preordered anything since... erm...
Final Fantasy X HD? I don't even remember if I actually preordered that or not. If I didn't, then the last one was
Bioshock Infinite. I preordered that because my experiences with
Bioshock left me relatively confident in Irrational's ability to provide another game I would enjoy, and they thankfully didn't disappoint. Haven't really preordered anything big since then, though, because I'm getting a bit more fickle with my spending and there hasn't really been anything interesting enough to me that I thought I had to ensure I owned it before it actually came out.
(Okay, that's not entirely true; I bought
Valkyria Chronicles the day before it released on the PC, but that was mostly because I had already read the PC Port Report on it and wanted to preload it due to my slow internet.)