Valve Tightens Its Early Access Rules

[Zydrate]

Aye, there's a few games that LOOK good but I tend to visit the user reviews and end up seeing a bunch of down arrows with things like "Man there's nothing to DO" and "Do not waste 30$ on this".

 

[Silvershock]

Oh, is Steam reacting to the fact that only 25% of early access games have ever seen full release?

Wow, that's even lower than I expected. Do you have sauce for those stats?

I have a general policy against buying into early access or pre-ordering. I've been burned most times. My only real exceptions were Star Citizen, which is clearly producing content, and Prison Architect, which is by Introversion and can't enter my library quickly enough.

Now the Mordheim game has gone early access. My initial instinct is "buy buy buy", especially as the first playable race is Skaven (rat furry likes his rats), but it's from Games Sodding Workshop. Why the hell does it need to be early access?

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

Do not ask your customers to bet on the future of your game.

Isn't that more or less contrary to, well....everything? I mean, Steam even advertises these games by saying you can follow their development and such.

i think they meant

"your game must already be worth money"


personally, i think its not enough, guaranteed refunds would truthly force devs to work on their games, theyll think twice before abandoning development

And where'd the refunds come from after the devs have already spent hmm?
The problem with EA has always been the consumer not so much the dev. I mean ... seriously How hard is it to you know.. not spend money and wait for the actual release.

This is just Steam doing their best to prevent idjits with too much time, and money( and not enough braincells) from themselves.


The concept of a a EA is admirable gbut really what you've got is a Kickstarter.. you're not paying to get the game a month or two before everyone else... no you're making a donation. The reward of which is instant access to the incomplete game and the complete game when it's finished.

If those terms do not agree with you... then 'wait'.

make the customer entitles to a refund 1 week after purchasing an early access game

that way devs would truthly be forced to work on their game

 

[Kaendris]

I have always wondered why there was not a "trial period" for EA games.

Simply put, you get to try the game out for 7 days no cost. If you like it, then you can pay in at the end of the seven day stretch and maintain EA access.

Steam already gives 1-2 week trials of games they are trying to push, how difficult would it be to convert this program over into the EA side is the real question.

I believe this would solve a fair amount of the "scam" issues. That being said, it does nothing to address long term failures in development cycles, or "over promise/under deliver" situations that plague the EA pool.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

Do not ask your customers to bet on the future of your game.

Isn't that more or less contrary to, well....everything? I mean, Steam even advertises these games by saying you can follow their development and such.

i think they meant

"your game must already be worth money"


personally, i think its not enough, guaranteed refunds would truthly force devs to work on their games, theyll think twice before abandoning development

And where'd the refunds come from after the devs have already spent hmm?
The problem with EA has always been the consumer not so much the dev. I mean ... seriously How hard is it to you know.. not spend money and wait for the actual release.

This is just Steam doing their best to prevent idjits with too much time, and money( and not enough braincells) from themselves.


The concept of a a EA is admirable gbut really what you've got is a Kickstarter.. you're not paying to get the game a month or two before everyone else... no you're making a donation. The reward of which is instant access to the incomplete game and the complete game when it's finished.

If those terms do not agree with you... then 'wait'.

make the customer entitles to a refund 1 week after purchasing an early access game

And what do you expect devs to do in a week?.


See this is the sort of thiong that EA has to put up with customers who have no clue. and base expectations on said cluelessness

that way devs would truthly be forced to work on their game

devs will me forced to keep their game updated and playable to avoid new players from getting refunds and counter negative word of mouth

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

devs will me forced to keep their game updated and playable to avoid new players from getting refunds and counter negative word of mouth

And here's where your lack of software engineering shows ... 90% of changes to code will never be visible to the end user... that can basically change one function for another in the code and call it an update...

Or just add a superfluous line of code.. and call it a tweak.
SO in short it'd be the consumer getting doubly shafted... you'd more or less wid up dounloading weekly updates that change bugger all.

And here's where your lack of software engineering shows

PFFFFF HAHAHAHA

alright let me give you this little bit of news pal, i AM a software engineer, we are talking about games that have not been updated in MONTHS, no bug fixes, no nothing

 

[Reincarnatedwolfgod]

so Valve finally recognizes early access has problems and are actually doing something about it.
If this is enforced then I this is a good start but more should be done to make early access better.

 

[Vigormortis]

I am glad they are trying to do something about this (finaly) but I would be happy if they simply had a filter on the main page that would allow me to remove early access and indi games from appearing. You can already do it with dlc so I don't imagine it would be difficult.

But you can.

Just click the [customize] button at the top right of the marquee you want to edit and you can select which types of games and software appear.

Hope that helps.

 

[Saviordd1]

My Reaction:

Though I fear that this won't actually fix anything in practice. We'll see Jim ripping a ton of Early Access games to shreds yet.

 

[Dagda Mor]

personally, i think its not enough, guaranteed refunds would truthly force devs to work on their games, theyll think twice before abandoning development

That's simply too extreme to be feasible. They wouldn't be able to afford giving a refund to every customer, so all it would do is kick the people on the development out of the video game industry forever, put debt on the people on the development team, and give a partial refund for in-store credit to the people who bought and played an incomplete game.

And besides that, devs not finishing EA projects isn't much of an issue, imo. Unless your game gets mega-popular, most players will get the soul of the game when it first goes up on the store. When you make a game, you're presenting its soul to people, and all you can do once you've captured that soul is improve the way you present it. There's no point on working on the presentation if most of the people who will play the game have already come to understand it.

 

[robert022614]

So this does what? As far as I got it stops them from making promises, which doesn't really stop any kind of abandonment or infinite early access alpha time.

 

[Gizmo1990]

Snip

Snip

Thank you both. It is a big help. I had mostly ignored the new features mainly because I could not be arsed to explore what had been added.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

I think the deal people make over early access is silly. People seem to want a way to support their own judgement whether it was good or bad so it has no consequences. It's really simple, any early access game is a risk. Realize it may be a total loss. That's on the buyer and it is easy.

Now more guidelines are fine, but not necessary in my mind.

 

[Rad Party God]

These guidelines sound reasonable enough, heck, some of them should be common sense for every dev, but sadly, Valve truly needed to write and specify these guidelines, worst part is that they took their sweet time to post this (Valve Time).

 

[Avaholic03]

So Steam's Early Access program has had some success stories [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/130679-DayZ-Alpha-Sells-172K-in-Its-First-Day]

You're counting DayZ as a success story? Because their hacker friendly, terminally delayed, worse-than-ARMA-mod version doesn't seem like a particularly successful version of how to do early access. It just had better marketing than the other cynical cash-grabs that never intend to complete their game.

If you want to see the right way to do early access, check out Space Engineers. Weekly updates, constant dialogue with the community, constantly improving game that even from the start was fun. Best example I've seen.

OT: glad to see Steam finally doing something. "Better late than never" seems to be Valve's motto.

 

[RandV80]

I think the deal people make over early access is silly. People seem to want a way to support their own judgement whether it was good or bad so it has no consequences. It's really simple, any early access game is a risk. Realize it may be a total loss. That's on the buyer and it is easy.

Now more guidelines are fine, but not necessary in my mind.

It's kind of gamer equivalent to an old man "get off my lawn!!!" thing. Take the worst example of early access you can find, like on Jim Sterling's youtube channel I saw a video for some barely playable dragon game. Is it embarassing to Steam that this is on the store page? Definitely. Is it ripping people off? That I really doubt. I mean unless you're aiming to make a humorous lets play video or maybe you know the developers and want to support them, you'd have to be an idiot to be tricked into buying that game. I'd be surprised if they have more than double digits in sales.

That Dayz clone maybe pulled off a successful scam, but apart from that it's pretty damn obvious when not to buy an early access game. I don't know if this is something a dev can turn off, but if you look at one of the games pages on Steam it will tell you how many people are currently playing it. Good early access games will have a few hundred to a few thousand playing them at any given time. But go ahead and look through the first page of new early access games to see if anyone's palying, just watch out for that tumbleweed blowing behind you.

Ultimately what people need to understand is Valve is a privately held corporation which means Gabe Newell can do what he wants, and he's very much a pro developer kind of guy. Early Access is useful to start up developers and there are a number of success stories, so even if there are some bad apples it's not going anywhere. Of course he likes us customers too, but he's not going to start going all Walmart on the 'suppliers' just for our sakes.

 

[Signa]

personally, i think its not enough, guaranteed refunds would truthly force devs to work on their games, theyll think twice before abandoning development

That's simply too extreme to be feasible. They wouldn't be able to afford giving a refund to every customer, so all it would do is kick the people on the development out of the video game industry forever, put debt on the people on the development team, and give a partial refund for in-store credit to the people who bought and played an incomplete game.

And besides that, devs not finishing EA projects isn't much of an issue, imo. Unless your game gets mega-popular, most players will get the soul of the game when it first goes up on the store. When you make a game, you're presenting its soul to people, and all you can do once you've captured that soul is improve the way you present it. There's no point on working on the presentation if most of the people who will play the game have already come to understand it.

At least you're being consistent. I know this conversation isn't about piracy, but you do seem to overvalue what a dev does from the quote below. I don't know how you think that allowing full refunds wouldn't help fix this EA problem. Make devs work for their money, and not just lazily throw some code together to get some bucks flowing on empty promises. No one is going to ask for refunds on games that are worth playing, so this can only screw over bad devs that don't deserve to be paid.

...your desire to play a game is simply not as important as paying the developer for its work, and you have no right to play a game unless you pay the owner whatever price it has decided to charge.

 

[Signa]

I think the deal people make over early access is silly. People seem to want a way to support their own judgement whether it was good or bad so it has no consequences. It's really simple, any early access game is a risk. Realize it may be a total loss. That's on the buyer and it is easy.

Now more guidelines are fine, but not necessary in my mind.

When your solution to a problem is to tell everyone who doesn't think like you to change the way they act to be more like you, it isn't a solution, it's idealism. I agree with what you are saying, but it just will never work that way.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

I think the deal people make over early access is silly. People seem to want a way to support their own judgement whether it was good or bad so it has no consequences. It's really simple, any early access game is a risk. Realize it may be a total loss. That's on the buyer and it is easy.

Now more guidelines are fine, but not necessary in my mind.

When your solution to a problem is to tell everyone who doesn't think like you to change the way they act to be more like you, it isn't a solution, it's idealism. I agree with what you are saying, but it just will never work that way.

I don't think there is an actual problem. I think people are blaming their own mistakes on others and claiming it is a problem.

If they are aware enough of the perils associated with early access to complain then they are aware enough to modify their habits anyways

Of course Valve should do something... Not because the customers deserve it but because in a business being right isn't always enough and solutions of this nature, such as better guidelines, are not exactly expensive or difficult

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

I think the deal people make over early access is silly. People seem to want a way to support their own judgement whether it was good or bad so it has no consequences. It's really simple, any early access game is a risk. Realize it may be a total loss. That's on the buyer and it is easy.

Now more guidelines are fine, but not necessary in my mind.

It's kind of gamer equivalent to an old man "get off my lawn!!!" thing. Take the worst example of early access you can find, like on Jim Sterling's youtube channel I saw a video for some barely playable dragon game. Is it embarassing to Steam that this is on the store page? Definitely. Is it ripping people off? That I really doubt. I mean unless you're aiming to make a humorous lets play video or maybe you know the developers and want to support them, you'd have to be an idiot to be tricked into buying that game. I'd be surprised if they have more than double digits in sales.

That Dayz clone maybe pulled off a successful scam, but apart from that it's pretty damn obvious when not to buy an early access game. I don't know if this is something a dev can turn off, but if you look at one of the games pages on Steam it will tell you how many people are currently playing it. Good early access games will have a few hundred to a few thousand playing them at any given time. But go ahead and look through the first page of new early access games to see if anyone's palying, just watch out for that tumbleweed blowing behind you.

Ultimately what people need to understand is Valve is a privately held corporation which means Gabe Newell can do what he wants, and he's very much a pro developer kind of guy. Early Access is useful to start up developers and there are a number of success stories, so even if there are some bad apples it's not going anywhere. Of course he likes us customers too, but he's not going to start going all Walmart on the 'suppliers' just for our sakes.

Hey my best friend got that dragon game! XD

She knew it was at a shitty stage she just loves dragons too much to care XD

But yeah, I agree with you. I don't tend to dabble in early access but if I do consider it I know what to look for