FUCK! HOLD UP A SECOND EVERYONE! SOMEONE GET GABE ON THE PHONE, HE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT HIS OWN COMPANY IS FOR!!!! LOL!!!!Zontar said:I keep seeing people throwing around "investment" and "crowd funding", but the problem with that is, Early Access is not an investment any more then me buying groceries is. You are buying a product and that is all (and given that it's a game on Steam, technically it isn't even buying it outside of the EU).
Investment implies a return or possibility of return, which is a criteria Early Access does not meet without stretching the definition to encompass all purchases.
And crowd funding has no place on Steam. Steam is a retail outlet that has a forum and in-game item market attached to it. That isn't a place for showing unproven concepts that have no guarantee of working or ever bearing fruition. There's a place for that already, and it's called Kickstarter.
Steam can be whatever the fuck it wants to be. No one crowned Zontar the Emporer of all things retail. Companies can and do branch out.
The investment is in the form of a game being made that you're (presumably) highly interested in being released in it's finished state. The investment is in your additional funds during the development phase of the game aiding the production of said game and ideally leading to a better game at the end of it.
This isn't hard to understand.
You point out random company X that abused Early Access as a reason to get rid of Early Access altogether, i point out random company Y that abused retail in general as a reason to get rid of retail altogether. And both of us just look stupid.
Captcha: oh sigh