Troy Goodfellow

Episode 299: Earliest Access

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Rob is joined by Darkest Dungeon developer Tyler Sigman as well as Jon Shafer and Soren Johnson to talk about Early Access. As more games come onto the market in Early Access, gamers are getting more vocal about how it should be done and whether it's ultimately good for the consumer or the developer. Jon and Soren certainly have opinions, and they don't always align. The important thing to remember is that Soren and Jon both love you very much and this is not your fault.

 

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With regards to middle ground early access, there's a scheme that I believe Google's started offering to Android devs where you can choose what percentage of people a new release gets rolled out to.  Something similar for Steam would be worth lobbying for.  Both for initial release, and for subsequent versions.  It would be very nice to be able to say "I only want 5% of people to see my new early access release, and at least half of them must have purchased at least one early access title before".  Or "I think this new version is bug free, but let's only roll it out to 20% of installed base and make sure...".

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One thing this conversation makes clear is that Early Access (and I'll continue to capitalize it in this post to make clear I'm specifically referring to the Steam program) is more of a marketing term than any concrete idea about what state a particular game is in.

 

When you had physical media a game was done when it shipped, but in the digital space a ship date is more of a metaphor, and Early Access plays with this slipperiness.

 

It is not as if a game is even finished when it hits 1.0. On any given day I'll get back home from work, click on Steam and typically see 4 or 5 games being updated, and it is probably a 50/50 proposition whether any given update is an Early Access game or not.

 

All Early Access means is a promise from the developer that the game is still being worked on, whereas a "finished" game contains no such promise. But games like Civ 5 and Crusader Kings 2 are very different from when people first started purchasing them compared to where they are now even though these aren't early access titles. So I think there's a powerful point in Soren's argument, that taking advantage of Early Access is basically a form of arbitrage for developers... basically free money on the table. The only risk is if it reduces later exposure.

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With regards to middle ground early access, there's a scheme that I believe Google's started offering to Android devs where you can choose what percentage of people a new release gets rolled out to.  Something similar for Steam would be worth lobbying for.  Both for initial release, and for subsequent versions.  It would be very nice to be able to say "I only want 5% of people to see my new early access release, and at least half of them must have purchased at least one early access title before".  Or "I think this new version is bug free, but let's only roll it out to 20% of installed base and make sure...".

 

Are you suggesting that the storefront in question only advertise early access title to users who qualify, or that it's not even accessible for the users who don't qualify?  If it's first, then yeah Steam could do the thing they did with DLC (which used to really poop on New Release section, coughtrainsimulatorcough), which is by default have Steam check it off so only those who actively choose to seek out that content in front page will see it.  If it's latter then wow that's really bizarre new landscape and not sure how it would even work.

 

 

One thing this conversation makes clear is that Early Access (and I'll continue to capitalize it in this post to make clear I'm specifically referring to the Steam program) is more of a marketing term than any concrete idea about what state a particular game is in.

 

...

 

Indeed, same with alpha, beta, pre-alpha (isn't that prototyping?), whatever the heck people want to label a game as.

 

BTW Rob laying down some much needed wisdom bomb on how lot of internet rages are more of silly postures from customers who will probably buy into the next hype again... also another one on how 'everyone loves winners' syndrome where popular things get more popular cause they are popular and noone can really affect that snowballing.  Double wisdom bombs.  Whoah

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With regards to middle ground early access, there's a scheme that I believe Google's started offering to Android devs where you can choose what percentage of people a new release gets rolled out to.  Something similar for Steam would be worth lobbying for.  Both for initial release, and for subsequent versions.  It would be very nice to be able to say "I only want 5% of people to see my new early access release, and at least half of them must have purchased at least one early access title before".  Or "I think this new version is bug free, but let's only roll it out to 20% of installed base and make sure...".

 

Yep. Google Play Developer Console allows you to keep at least three separate branches with different publicity settings. You can specify people who will get direct links to the app or group everyone can join to gain access to app. You can also select countries that will have access to app and ask Google not to advertise the app outside of GooglePlay. However you are *forced* to upload big advertising image for spotlights. Old apps can exist without it but you can't publish new public version without giving Google spotlight pic.

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Enjoyed this discussion, and if Soren is reading this, I have listened to all of your podcasts, which are fascinating. So nice to listen to such in depth discussion about game design, especially when conducted by another designer/ programmer, and someone who has played/ appreciated these games. Your time as TMA intern has served you well! ;) You are a terrific host.

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This was a fantastic episode!  Of course I feel that about 3MA episodes... Regardless, I think Early Access, or early access in general (not the capitalized and non-capitalized), can be a boon or draw back.  I see the postives and negatives from both a developer and publisher standpoint.  More imporantly, I view Early Access and its ilk through the lense of what I consider myself: a consumer.

 

I've determined Early Access and betas, alphas, zetas, ipsilons, etc. just aren't for me.  I have to look at my game time as opportunity cost.  I have a finite amount of video game time and I need to maximize my fun ratio.  If I'm playing one game, I cannot, therefore, play another game.  I would very much enjoy being apart of the development process and to help a game grow.  I just don't have the time and attention span to do it.  That's not to say my time is more important than a more dedicated gamer who is willing to help a game through that process.  I'm just not willing to do that. 

 

I also suffer from video game ADHD in that I can't play any one game for too long.  I can put many hours into a game and not think twice but I will eventually get tired of it.  As such, if I spend most of the time helping guide a game to where I would like it to be, by the time it gets to something I want to play, I'll be bored with it and want to move on.  Also, if I'm playing a game and run into a glitch or poor performance I get frustrated and won't go back.  For instance I gleefully picked up Day Z when it first launched in Early Access and jumped head first into it.  I put roughly 15-20 hours into the game and walked away just disgusted.  I experienced several glitches and poor performance.  Never again.  Before H1Z1 launched a couple friends wanted to hop on to Day Z in prep for it.  I refused.  I also have refused to pick up H1Z1.  Obviously an isolated incident but I just don't want to put time into something that I know for sure isn't finished and will likely not work. 

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I'm sure Jon appreciated being the pinata during this episode. I think this is the first time I've considered Soren to be flat-out wrong on a topic.

 

He's not only wrong, but I feel like he's being disingenuous. The way he makes it sound, you can only perform robust testing on a game when it's for sale on Steam Early Access. That middle ground he keeps pining for is a beta. A closed beta. It gets lots of people testing, but you can restrict how many and who they are. The thing he's not saying is that historically you can't charge people forty bucks a pop to test for you. I don't begrudge him wanting to make piles of money. I do begrudge him giving advice to Jon like Jon's being an idiot for not embracing Steam Early Access. Yes, it's a win-win for devs to get testers to pay them for the priveledge of testing. But likewise it's a lose-lose proposition for the customers that pay to do QA work. I wouldn't talk down to Jon just because he has more respect for his customers.

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I think it's extremely unfair to say Soren doesn't respect his customers because he gives them the opportunity to buy into early access. Nobody has to buy the game. People know what they're getting with Early Access. There's nothing dishonest or disrespectful about it at all. (That is, in principle. Certain developers might not follow through on promises, which admittedly one has to take into account when considering a purchase...)

 

For competitive games, playtesting and lots of it is required for balancing and development of the different factions. The more players the better, and the more committed they are the better. The only way to make sure the game is competitively interesting is to have a bunch of people break it over and over by becoming very skilled at it and finding great strategies. (This might superficially sound like QA, but the competitive aspect takes it beyond functional considerations into the realm of design.) I think this was the point Soren was trying to emphasize.

 

The merits of *Steam* Early Access in achieving that kind of serious play, and how applicable it is to other types of games, can certainly be debated. But I 100% agree that for competitive strategy games, a huge amount of dedicated playtesting is crucial to developing a playable game, let alone a good one. And personally I don't have a problem if developers want to charge for access to what can be a fun and challenging process. If it funds the game's development as well, so much the better. Sounds like a win-win for the customer and developer, which many people choose to accept. Of course, you are free to reject the offer.

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I think I'm in Jon's camp when it comes to playing early access games: life is too short and there are plenty of great games waiting for me to play that have been released and patched and balanced. I don't see how anybody has time to play the games that are out, let along earlyaccess games, unless you're just interacting with them on a surface level.

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For competitive games, playtesting and lots of it is required for balancing and development of the different factions. The more players the better, and the more committed they are the better. The only way to make sure the game is competitively interesting is to have a bunch of people break it over and over by becoming very skilled at it and finding great strategies. (This might superficially sound like QA, but the competitive aspect takes it beyond functional considerations into the realm of design.) I think this was the point Soren was trying to emphasize.

 

Yeah, that sums it up well. I've been part of non-paid private betas before - we had a great one set up for Civ4 - but the feedback I've gotten via Early Access already completely dwarfs what I saw from betas, both in terms of quality and quantity. In about seven weeks, we've already had about 3 or 4 major balance changes which have demonstrably improved gameplay, and I'm convinced that would not have happened with a private beta (unless you happen to be Blizzard with a built-in audience).

 

As for Jon, I guess my main point is that I don't see how Early Access could possibly be a bad thing for At The Gates, and I see lots of way it could be a good thing for the project, with the number one reason being it's the best way to get a high quantity of feedback before he officially releases the game.

 

Are you listening, Jon??!??!? Don't make me come to Michigan!!!!111!!!1!

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Obviously the only way to settle this is by somehow hooking together Civ IV and Civ V multiplayer and battling it out with your respective pedigrees.

 

(Alternatively, Offworld Trading Company and At the Gates!)

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Yeah, that sums it up well. I've been part of non-paid private betas before - we had a great one set up for Civ4 - but the feedback I've gotten via Early Access already completely dwarfs what I saw from betas, both in terms of quality and quantity.

 

BTW, anyone of you who wanted Soren to just make a big list "Why is Civ4 so great" you can get something like that from

.

 

Had I heard correctly that Offworld Trade Company costs more in Early Access? I think Galactic Civilization 3 did this at least for a time. Seems to be a good way to do Early Access. But only if Steam allows you to write with big red letters "It will be cheaper when is over, only buy now if you're nerd".

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Hello!

 

1.) I've noticed a while ago that the meaning of "alpha" and "beta" slipped.

If I'm not mistaken, before the transition from alpha to beta meant that the software was feature complete (and you could open the software to external testing) ;

and from beta to release meant that most of the bugs were removed (because post-release patching was rare as it had to be done by shipping disks and manually installing the patches).

http://blog.codinghorror.com/alpha-beta-and-sometimes-gamma/

Then with the popularization of the Internet people could then download patches and install them themselves. So, automatically, companies started to pay less attention to QA. (Another answer to that in the game industry were expansion packs that allowed them to also patch people that didn't have Internet access.)

Now we are at the situation where for most people the patching is done automatically (by Steam for instance), so the general software state at release is even worse.

 

All the while a semantic drift happened where beta became release (or the infamous UberEnt gamma), alpha became beta, and pre-alpha became alpha.

 

2.) I'd say that the players are between two extreme viewpoints :

- The first where what matters to you the most is the process : you get the most fun from the game's evolution and interaction with the community. So the earlier you can get into the game, the better. This is obviously very time-consuming.

- The second where you want a finished, polished, final product. In this case you could say Early Access only ends when the game isn't being patched anymore and new content released. Of course this doesn't work too well with games relying mostly on multiplayer.

 

3.) I feel that a lot of this discussion comes down to ethics :

Doing early access is a choice that will impact other people (for instance those that keep saying they don't want to buy early access but still do it).

Likewise, exploiting human psychology with "pay not to wait" and "pay to win" mechanics is also a choice. (we're all responsible human beings, we won't fall into this kind of trap, right? right??)

Of course these two examples certainly aren't on the same level on the scale of taking advantage of the weaknesses of other people, but as long as you're aware of what you're doing where do you draw the line? And are you willing to become less "competitive" than other people that are doing these things but either aren't aware of the implications or just don't care?

 

4.) At many points you were saying, "If only we knew how people are behaving" with regards to this thing or another. I think in many cases this information is actually available, it's even often easy to browse on websites like these :

http://steamcharts.com

 

5.) Hmm, "At the Gates of the Offworld Trading Company!" ?

 

6.) About Let's Plays not existing 5 years ago... they did!

 

In 2004, fraps was already at version 2.1 : http://www.fraps.com/news.php

YouTube was created in 2005

Xfire added video recording in january 2008 and broadcasting in september 2008 : http://media.xfire.com/xfire/readme2.html

 

Recorded video of Civilization 4, uploaded in 2011 here :

http://classic.xfire.com/video/2922be/

Other videos :

http://classic.xfire.com/video/30f8e9/

http://classic.xfire.com/video_search/?q=civilization&m=all&sort=views&uploaded=any_time

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1.) I've noticed a while ago that the meaning of "alpha" and "beta" slipped.

If I'm not mistaken, before the transition from alpha to beta meant that the software was feature complete (and you could open the software to external testing) ;

and from beta to release meant that most of the bugs were removed (because post-release patching was rare as it had to be done by shipping disks and manually installing the patches).

 

    That's a rose-tinted view of a golden age that never really existed, I think.  I got into game development professionally in the mid 1990s, and even then there wasn't much of a real consensus about what alpha vs. beta vs. release meant.

 

    Depending on where you worked, what the schedule looked like, and your team's culture, Alpha could mean:

 

- feature complete but buggy

- "vertical slice" feature complete, but buggy

- ready for QA to start working on, but don't bother reporting anything except crash bugs

- ready for level scripters, but buggy

- any of a pile of other meanings, all of which include "but buggy"

 

    Beta has always been fuzzy.  It usually implies exposure to people beyond the team, but that could be focus testing, sending builds to the publisher, releasing to a select list of users, wide release to users, release to third-party QA, release to full test-everything internal QA, or a number of other things.

 

    Most people agree on "gold master", more or less, but it's much less relevant these days unless you're doing console games.

 

    The problem is twofold; the ability to patch, and the complexity of the software.  Back in the 8bit and 16bit days, games were much simpler and easier to test exhaustively, and they were often being burned into ROMs which are (needless to say) not patchable in any practical way.  The ease of testing and the inability to fix shipped problems meant that games tended to ship relatively bug-free, for the most part.  Even then, though, there were debacles; Darklands, IIRC, was abandoned by the publisher after something like the 11th patch hadn't fixed all the bugs, and that shipped in 1992 when 14.4K modems were still pretty new and most people had no idea this Internet thing even existed.

 

    The hardware has gotten more powerful, the ability to patch has gotten easier, and software complexity has expanded along with them.  Complexity means there's more to test, and the increase is combinatorial; each additional thing can potentially interact with everything else, and each interaction is a potential point of failure.  The fuzzy definitions of "Alpha" and "Beta" are just an outgrowth of this.

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    That's a rose-tinted view of a golden age that never really existed, I think.  I got into game development professionally in the mid 1990s, and even then there wasn't much of a real consensus about what alpha vs. beta vs. release meant.

 

Well, as the article I linked mentions, these terms are originally much older, created probably somewhere between 1945 and 1980 at IBM's (and apply generally to not only video games, but software in general, and even hardware, originally).

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Well, as the article I linked mentions, these terms are originally much older, created probably somewhere between 1945 and 1980 at IBM's (and apply generally to not only video games, but software in general, and even hardware, originally).

 

Fair enough, but it means they date to a different time and arguably a completely different field.  The computer in your smartphone is more powerful than the best machines available to national governments in the 1980s.  A teenager with a commodity PC can make software orders of magnitude more complex than a large team could manage in the 1980s, simply because the tools are so much more powerful, the machines are so much more powerful, and the software infrastructure is so much more developed.

 

Software development methodology from the days of drum storage and punchcard stacks may no longer be a good fit for the current age.

 

Which isn't to say we've mastered these things; quite the reverse.  I think we're currently stuck between old ideas that only sort of work and new ideas ("agile", notably) which have one or two good ideas at their heart but have metastasized into dogma, lecture circuit fodder and consluting.  I'm sure there are better ways, but they're largely eluding the industry at the moment.

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Yep. Very playable build is out to backers now. I’m going to wait until release to play my Kickstarter copy. Very happy to see this come to fruition.

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On 12/17/2018 at 3:14 AM, Marchettus said:

All-

 

At the gates is being released January 23 2019.

 

Very wild

 

On 12/18/2018 at 7:19 PM, spacerumsfeld said:

Yep. Very playable build is out to backers now. I’m going to wait until release to play my Kickstarter copy. Very happy to see this come to fruition.

 

I searched my email for the one that might have included a key for backers - couldn’t find anything. How can I play it now?

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On 23/12/2018 at 9:03 PM, graddy said:

 

 

I searched my email for the one that might have included a key for backers - couldn’t find anything. How can I play it now?

 

The email is [email protected] I'm not sure if the build is only for high-tier backers or not. The steam keys (and DRM free download link) should go out on the release day, the 23rd, for backers.

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