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Rob Zacny

Episode 215: Early Access

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Tom Chick and Rob talk about the rise of early access programs, whether it's a good thing, and what it means for their work.

 

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That was a good episode!

 

As someone who plays games, part of the appeal of early access is the appeal of crowd funding; knowing that I can vote with my wallet for something that might not be possible under traditional funding models, and knowing that by directly contributing to development I'm hopefully helping to insulate the project from some of the worse aspects of the traditional publisher/producer model.  While the developers often do say "we're making the game you want us to make", they do have the latitude to treat design discussions with the backers as advisory.  That latitude is often not there when the backer is a single entity like a publisher.

 

I also see it as a more honest version of what's been going on for years; *everything* is early access these days, even if it claims not to be.  When was the last time you bought a game that didn't get patched within a month of release?  Unless it was on a DS/DSi/3DS cartridge, I'll bet you'll have to think about it before you can answer.  For that matter, when was the last time you went more than a week without something on your phone or computer getting an update?

 

When the original xbox first got a hard disk, a colleague of mine said "Ship and patch just came to consoles.".  Someone pointed out that Microsoft had declared that there would be no ship and patch, you could only use the hard disk for saving games and caching, and the hard disk couldn't host executable content.  My colleague said "Yeah, and that'll stick right up to the point where some important game ships with a crash bug, at which point suddenly it will turn out that executables are just data.  Once they cross that line once...".  So here we are.  Everything is always in beta, it's just a question of how honest the developer of the software is being about it.

 

With my developer hat on, early access means a lot of things, building an audience, getting the word out, the kind of extended testing and validating that only the biggest companies could afford before.  The biggest thing early access gives, though, is the chance to try interesting designs that would never make it past a green light committee with a publisher or other large backer.

 

It makes sense, really; for a large single backer like a publisher, there are all sorts of considerations; does the idea look like it can make more money than they spend on it, does it look like something they can market, is the PR group good with this kind of title, does it fit with their brand or will they need to consider making a new label for it, do they have an open shelf slot in walmart in the appropriate genre when the game is due to ship, what are the comparables...

 

For individual players, the only considerations are "Do I have $20 I can live without?" and "Does it look like something I'd want to play?" and perhaps "Do these folks look like they'll be able to finish it?", though if the early access version actually runs and isn't dependent on a specific server you've got something even if the company implodes the moment you finish downloading the build.

 

We're planning on launching something ourselves shortly, so I'm obviously not coming at this unbiased, but from the point of view of a small studio hoping to get a (we think) interesting strategy project off the ground, early access and Kickstarter are massive.  Promising projects we've shelved because publishers would never back them are up for consideration again.

 

Fundamentally, one of the biggest problems in this industry for a long time has been the customer relationship.  In theory, the customer is the person who plays games, but for many years that hasn't really been true.  As a developer, our customer is the publisher; they're paying the bills, they call the shots; if we don't do what they want, they can find someone who can.  If we don't pitch something that fits their needs, they'll go elsewhere.

 

So, who are the publisher's customers?  Not the people playing games, unfortunately.  Just as the developers are beholden to the desires of the publishers, the publishers are beholden to Walmart and the other major stores.  Competition for shelf slots in Walmart is pretty fierce from what I understand.  They are also somewhat beholden to the odd beast that is metacritic.  The publishers are also fairly large, and are in the main public companies, so they're also mostly beholden to their shareholders.

 

The people who play games are nearly irrelevant in this system; the developers actually making the games are several steps removed from the player, and any of those steps can withhold the player's money.

 

Early access and crowdfunding short-circuits the whole broken system.  Suddenly, the people playing the game are actually the developer's direct customer.  There are no middlemen and no other sources of gravity pulling the developer away from the player.  We're finally free again to make the games we think people will want to play, and to try crazy things that might or might not work, without knowing that it's doomed from the start because some gatekeeper between us and the player will refuse to let us try.

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i bought don't starve early and i had a lot of problems with it, but the fact that it was beta made me hopeful these things would be fixed, plus i went onto the forums and expressed what i didn't like about it and  it seems to me that a lot of my concerns were fixed, i would say it is because i have a lot of experience playing all kinds of games that gave be the ability to see where it was going rather than just take it as it is, but i would say that don't starve is the type of game that works with early access because it is procedurally generated, so no specific story.

 

and guess what, some people like to be helpful to developers, not everybody wants fundamental flaws in final release of the game, some people would like to tell developers where they are going wrong so that the game gets better

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I will definitely second the misgivings caused by getting into the Sins of a Dark Age beta early. Man that was a chore to play - 90% cloned from League of Legends except for their snappy control and readable graphics. 

 

I wonder if it's improved any. At least it has one semi-unique selling point now, the quest system.

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i couldn't judge the quality of a LoL/DOTA type game because i have only played LoL a bit and i just don't understand how people can get so worked up about the game i have seen my friend play with him ending many matches screaming at his screen saying his team was bad (which i always assume that means the person saying it was bad because it is a team game) anyway i guess it just isn't my type of game (maybe a single player version would be better) so i couldn't separate faults with the game from faults with the genre, so i think you need to be familiar with the genre or at least familiar with similar mechanics to be able to actually contribute anything useful other than "this game sucks" or "wow this is new and interesting" 

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Like a lot of other people, I'm also of two minds about this. If it helps games get funded that otherwise might not have, and help make the final product more polished than it otherwise would have been then that's a win-win for everyone. However the cynic in me is also wary of how less scrupulous developers might approach this... Tom brought up the excellent hypothetical of releasing a perpetual "beta" that never really reaches a final state of polish. So hopefully we won't see this development trend turn into something sour because I do think there is a lot of potential.

 

I'm like Tom, and generally have no interest in early releases, although I did get the alpha for At the Gates. I'm not really sure what made that different from other kickstarter games I've backed, but for some reason I found the idea of watching that game develop to be a much more interesting prospect than other games I might play, perhaps because Jon is an interesting and eloquent enough guy to listen to when he discusses game design.

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i would say the perfect large publisher "beta" model would be team fortress 2 for me, i got it with the orange box so technically i bought it for a cheaper price and it was heavily developed near the early release then once it was polished and basically done it was turned into a free play game that is still updated, if every large publisher followed that model  that would be perfect, and as for indie developers minecraft is the perfect model, it did get a final release (everyone knew that :P ) but is still updated

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Like a lot of other people, I'm also of two minds about this. If it helps games get funded that otherwise might not have, and help make the final product more polished than it otherwise would have been then that's a win-win for everyone. However the cynic in me is also wary of how less scrupulous developers might approach this... Tom brought up the excellent hypothetical of releasing a perpetual "beta" that never really reaches a final state of polish. So hopefully we won't see this development trend turn into something sour because I do think there is a lot of potential.

 

Any development model is open to abuse.  Look at the current brouhaha over Aliens: Colonial Marines; I haven't played the game, but if the allegations are true (ie: that either the publisher or the developer released a presskit that misrepresented the game badly enough to wander into "fraudulent" territory) it's not like this is an isolated event.  I remember watching the art director at a triple-A studio I worked at a decade or so ago photoshopping "screenshots" for a presskit.  Hell, IIRC the "screenshots" on the original Wing Commander box were actually from a super high res version they had running on SGI graphics workstations; it certainly looked way better than the game had any hope of managing on a 320x200 8bit display.

 

Remember Darklands?  It was sold as a finished product.  I don't know if it was ever stable enough to play all the way through, but I remember when it was relatively new it was notoriously buggy, and even the most diehard fans of it I knew threw their hands up after the publisher said they were done trying to fix it.  I think it was patch K that went out with "there will be no patches after this" in the changelog.

 

Battlecruiser 3K?

 

I remember in the 90s buying UMS 2, the Universal Military Simulator 2 for PC for what at the time was a huge price.  The box said it would let you simulate Any Battle in History!  Except when I opened it I discovered that all that came in the box was an engine with a single crappy scenario and a mail-order catalog full of scenarios I could buy.

 

I agree with Tom; if the developer is asking for money for something, it is de facto fair game for review.  Sticking "beta" or "alpha" on it is certainly a statement of intent, and should be mentioned in the review, but it shouldn't insulate the game from criticism.  As I said earlier, I think everything is basically beta these days whether the developer admits it or not.  If you haven't fired up your game platform of choice for the last week, chances are something has been patched in the interim.  What "beta" means now is more what "alpha" used to mean; feature complete but probably buggy.  "Gold" now means what "beta" used to; "we fixed all the showstoppers and most of the non-cosmetic bugs, but heavy testing will probably turn up things that need fixing".  People are now openly talking about "minimum viable product" as the point where you should start releasing to the public.  And honestly, the increased complexity of software in the past decade means that's unlikely to change in the near term.

 

Early release has the virtue of being honest about all this.  It's at least telling you that there are going to be rough edges, and if you want the polished product then watch this space but don't get your wallet out just yet.  It's also telling you that if you like the idea you can vote for it now with your money and play it when it reaches whatever level of polish you're happy with.  Or hold off and pay when you're happy.

 

I backed Xenonauts.  Long ago.  I haven't even downloaded the game yet, because it's early access and in the case of Xenonauts I want it to be fairly far along before I try it.  I threw money at it as soon as I saw it, however, because I wanted to make sure that (a) I gave it a vote of confidence, and (b ) I get a copy of it however far along they manage to get it.  Minecraft I played the day I bought it, even though at the time it was pretty early days.  Kerbal Space Program I haven't bought yet, and it's still alpha as far as I know, but it's getting to the point where I think it's good enough for me to throw money at.

 

In my (very biased) opinion, early access is better than the alternatives in some respects and no worse in the rest.

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I agree 100% with Tom Chick. I'm possibly even more extreme... with most strategy games, I try to avoid playing them until they've been patched a couple of times. This even applies to games like XCOM (still not played). I heard there were some irritating bugs with the 3rd person camera, etc and didn't want them to spoil my initial enjoyment of the game. Likewise, I put off playing Civ V until the intial expansion was out, etc etc etc.

 

I've been doing this since the days of Civ IV.. Its a game I love, but I think it's a shame that the majority of the time I spent with hte games was on the early versions of it. The "final" game is vastly better (more balanced and with better AI), but I haven't played that nearly as much. Which seems a real shame.

 

 

(I should probably play XCOM this year)

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Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of the initial annoying bugs have been fixed in XCOM at this point, so yes, I agree that it would be a good idea to pick it up sometime this year...

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Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of the initial annoying bugs have been fixed in XCOM at this point, so yes, I agree that it would be a good idea to pick it up sometime this year...

 

And when I eventually do, I'll be able to experience the game without all those annoying bugs. Whereas, most people who jumped on XCOM when it first came out apppear to be more or less "done" with it now that the game actually works as intende :)

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I'd still be playing it if the last mission wasn't so tedious after multiple playthroughs ;-)

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I need to get back to xcom.   It's not quite the game I wanted, but it's close enough that I'm still happy to play it.

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Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of the initial annoying bugs have been fixed in XCOM at this point, so yes, I agree that it would be a good idea to pick it up sometime this year...

The answer to that is "not quite". However it's certainly a lot better than it was. The main difficultly with the bugs is Ironman mode. Accepting a bad mission because you made a mistake or the RNG god was against you is one thing. Accepting a bad mission because of the teleport bug (which still happens) is something else. It doesn't really matter if you are playing it on normal - just reload. In Ironman mode though its a bit of an issue. Especially early in the game if it costs you a good squad.

That said, don't let it put of you off playing it. The challenge is well worth it and you won't go back to normal mode once you turn on ironman.

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Any news when they're fixing that bug? It sounds incredibly annoying, as I would of though ironman is one of the main ways to play XCOM?

 

 

The answer to that is "not quite". However it's certainly a lot better than it was. The main difficultly with the bugs is Ironman mode. Accepting a bad mission because you made a mistake or the RNG god was against you is one thing. Accepting a bad mission because of the teleport bug (which still happens) is something else. It doesn't really matter if you are playing it on normal - just reload. In Ironman mode though its a bit of an issue. Especially early in the game if it costs you a good squad.

That said, don't let it put of you off playing it. The challenge is well worth it and you won't go back to normal mode once you turn on ironman.

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I think they claimed it was fixed in the last patch but still a lot of reports of it happening. It's sort of intrinsic with the game mechanics though I think. All I can say is that it's not nearly as common as it was. Think I had it once in my last campaign. Cost me badly but I did recover. Think you died in that mission too :;

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I didn't realise it until he was talking about it, but I feel exactly like Tom. I'm all for this early release stuff. It sounds all sorts of neat for those really invested in upcoming titles, and useful for developers to put some polish on their game. There's lots of good there. I want no part of it. Present me with something signed off as finished (with the proviso that the meaning of that can be highly flexible these days). If I get a handful of recommendations then I'll buy it.

 

I don't watch trailers for movies I'm interested in either.

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Hi, all.

Few things I would like to point out after listening.

1. Maybe it happened on occasion but this episode was very dialectic. First approaching it from negative standpoint, then discussing all the good stuff early access provides you made this collision of interests apparent. Nonetheless your overall conclusion was very simple and shows your tendency to ascribe every thing either good or bad status which is very restrictive. As restrictive as giving scores to games though.

 

2. You did not mention that game development is becoming infinite(you can always add more features). Modern games cost not only too much money to make but also too much time. Kicking the product out of the door unfinished and nonetheless fun to wide audience became common since minecraft. You just have to make sure that the product has enough new features even in alpha state. So making alpha access to FPS would not make people happy because FPS is so common already.

 

3. (Most) People don't understand that games take too much time to develop. So when showed some screenshots people tend to fantasize about a game and don't understand that game may be buggy. They think that visual screenshots constitute good gameplay. So when buggy nature of unfinished games will become more apparent to people whole early access approach may be in danger.

 

4. Giving access to promo material(trailers, revealing screenshots) almost always spoils things for people. Tom is quite right about this. The very nature of marketing contradicts its purpose. You want to make things more popular without giving final product. You give people a taste of final product. But doing so you also ruin final product because taste is not bottomless and it only takes away from a product. The worst thing you can do from this standpoint is a lets play of a game before it's released. But marketing is also essential part of making a product popular.

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Few things I would like to point out after listening.

1. Maybe it happened on occasion but this episode was very dialectic. First approaching it from negative standpoint, then discussing all the good stuff early access provides you made this collision of interests apparent. Nonetheless your overall conclusion was very simple and shows your tendency to ascribe every thing either good or bad status which is very restrictive. As restrictive as giving scores to games though.

 

    The impression I had was that they came into the episode thinking that the discussion was going to revolve around cases where the model is exploitive, and on discussing it realized that it can be good or bad, so the conclusion was more "huh, I guess it's less cut and dried than I thought when we were planning this podcast".

 

3. (Most) People don't understand that games take too much time to develop. So when showed some screenshots people tend to fantasize about a game and don't understand that game may be buggy. They think that visual screenshots constitute good gameplay. So when buggy nature of unfinished games will become more apparent to people whole early access approach may be in danger.

 

    Even absent the development model, this is the classic game marketing problem; you can't put the gameplay on the box.  Screenshots of Chess, Go or Diplomacy make them look like the most boring thing ever.  So the marketing becomes unhinged from the product.

 

    It's been that way from the start; have a look at a youtube video of someone playing Pitfall or Yars Revenge, and then see if you can dig up the box on google images.  Read the box copy and look at the art, and see how much relationship there is between that and what was on the cartridge.

 

4. Giving access to promo material(trailers, revealing screenshots) almost always spoils things for people. Tom is quite right about this. The very nature of marketing contradicts its purpose. You want to make things more popular without giving final product. You give people a taste of final product. But doing so you also ruin final product because taste is not bottomless and it only takes away from a product. The worst thing you can do from this standpoint is a lets play of a game before it's released. But marketing is also essential part of making a product popular.

 

    I really have to disagree here.  Promo trailers and the like can only spoil story elements or visual effects, not gameplay.  It's the games that rely on cinematics or flashy graphics that can be spoiled by trailers and screenshots.  Games that rely on their mechanics don't really spoil.

 

    The gameplay of Minecraft was compelling even in its early state, it's just as compelling today.  Kerbal Space Program is just getting more and more interesting the further along it gets.

 

    Sure, too much preview spoils the kind of on-rails semi-interactive movies that pass for AAA games these days, but unless they ship in a broken state I don't think early access to a strategy game does anything to harm it.

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I keep my comment in bullet point style notes, for quick reading. You can fill in the sentences in your mind:

  • (Attention is a currency. Attention Economy: what people want from you (and anyone): 1. Your money 2. Your attention.) "Beta" - the developer term - has turned into a marketing term (and money making scheme). Even IF there is a metaphysical intent to uphold some structure of development relevance. The deliberate ambiguity of what "beta" may mean, is where Publishers/PR/Marketing are cashing in? Telling me the "Good News" (= Gospel - εὐαγγέλιον euangélion, Christianity), does not make me turn into a salivating Pavlov's dog, throwing money at you - yet, it works on many?

 

  • (Early Access - The Emperor's New Clothes) The moment you ask for my money, what I would get - at that moment - is what it is (rough, broken, unfinished). Hence, this "is it worth my money?" moment is the one, you should write a p/review. I don't pay for the imaginary Utopia of what the game may (or more likely never will) turn into.

 

  • In Linguistics there are distinctions between what things really are and what we want to think of them. Words evoke our imagination. Marketing and PR makes use of this fact. The Psychology to lure the weak-minded "closed beta-access", "early-access", "give-us-feedback" - making people feel good about themselves, making them feel empowered and relevant, is one of the oldest tricks. (see "Denotation/Connotation", Ferdinand de Saussure, Gottlob Frege, John Stuart-Mill)

 

 

  • Gabe Newell himself, years ago, mentioned in a video interview, how they at Valve started to see the difference between what people 'say they do' and what 'they really do'. Trust the data. Don't trust the mob.

 

 

  • The days of "previews", when print magazines had exclusive access/pictures/cover stories and publishers sent you slide negatives and Photo-CDs (for print) are long gone? Video game previews always tasted like marketing too. Only better written. Sometimes.

 

  • Even reviews of proper games should mention the build version of the game, since many games are patched years later, get community updates and are improved (or not), while the googlebinged review stays the same (becomes irrelevant)?

 

Be like Tom Chick - I agree. I'm there. Make it a t-shirt. Now excuse me; I have a date with a certain girl from Ipanema:

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I've thought about it a bit more, and I will say there's one glaring example of a kickstarter campaign I've stayed far away from.  Project Godus.  For me it's the perfect example of a project that might some day produce something worth playing, but (a) it's likely to be nothing like as ambitious or interesting as promised (given the track record of the designer, I don't think that's an unfair assumption), and (b ) feel no need to be dragged along in the wake of it until it gets wherever it gets to.

 

So, I can understand where the "I don't pay for half-built toys" crowd is coming from; I'm with them occasionally.

 

But then a kickstarter comes along for something like StoneHearth or Jagged Alliance: Flashback, and I'm considering whether I can spare some cash...

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I'm still early in this podcast but I have one comment about the meaning of "beta".  Rob was talking about how blizzard puts out "betas" that are finished products, and he considers betas to be more "work in progress".  Really, the original meaning of beta IS "this is a finished product, we've done the internal alpha testing, we've shaken out the bugs we can shake out, now it's ready for a wider audience".  A "beta" should be a feature complete, almost ready to ship product.  It seems like the meaning of beta has been twisted into "pre-alpha", which is unfortunate.

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I'm still early in this podcast but I have one comment about the meaning of "beta".  Rob was talking about how blizzard puts out "betas" that are finished products, and he considers betas to be more "work in progress".  Really, the original meaning of beta IS "this is a finished product, we've done the internal alpha testing, we've shaken out the bugs we can shake out, now it's ready for a wider audience".  A "beta" should be a feature complete, almost ready to ship product.  It seems like the meaning of beta has been twisted into "pre-alpha", which is unfortunate.

 

The problem is the definition of "ready to ship".  Back before there was an easy method for patch distribution, "ready to ship" meant "we're very sure this works as advertised and has no crash bugs".  Now that it's easy to patch, "ready to ship" means "it worked for us, and users willing to use a beta have a cross-section of configurations our QA guys could only dream of".

 

Some of it is definitely economic pressure and the fact that the public has gotten used to it, but some of it is also that the increasing complexity and diversity of hardware platforms means the old way just wasn't working very well.

 

A good friend of mine worked on FF7 PC.  They tested the hell out of it, and it was a direct port of a Playstation game to PC.  Once it got out in the field it started crashing on some machines.  It turned out to be the movie player, which would crash if it wasn't fed data quickly enough.  The Playstation CDROM drive was listed as 2x speed, and it was really 2x speed.  PCs with 16x and 32x CDROMs were only rated that speed because that's how fast they streamed data out of cache; their actual transfer rate was closer to 1x over the long haul.  The QA team had tested PC 2x and 4x CDROM drives and thought they'd got all the slow ones, and never thought to check to see if the ones that claimed to be fast were actually the bad ones.  So, they tried hard to ship good, classical release quality software, but got bitten by a bad assumption about hardware vendors not lying.

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