It's Time to Reassess How We Think About Early Access and Crowdfunded Games

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

I've been thinking a lot about crowdfunded games, lately. It's been hard not to. Earlier this month Under the Ocean (one of my first forays into the world of buy-in betas) removed itself from sale on Steam Early Access after the loss of its lead programmer. According to the developer progress on the game will continue, but at a much slower pace. Days later, the story of the myriad disappointments surrounding Peter Molyneux's Godus broke. And yet just before these two lows was a pretty satisfying high: Starbound released an utterly phenomenal new patch, complete with the long awaited Novakid race. 

Up until now, I haven't been all that shy about buying into unfinished games. I, like a lot of people probably do, looked at it a lot like buying a game I would eventually be buying anyway. The difference was that I was buying it at a point when that money could still be used to improve the game and ensure its eventual release. Depending on the funding format, I might even get to play it (albeit in an incomplete and unpolished form) immediately. Win-win, right? 

Not necessarily, and that's why I've had to seriously reconsider the way that I think (and talk) about buying unfinished games.

Crowdfunding's various incarnations in gaming (Kickstarter, Early Access, buy-in betas and so on) have become firmly entrenched over the past few years, to the point that it's no longer just itty bitty indies taking advantage of them. As a result there have been a lot of high-profile successes, and a lot of equally high-profile failures. Some games have been released without features that were promised to early adopters resulting in (justified) outrage, PR nightmares, and notoriously hostile interviews. Other games have simply died on the vine, even though that's what this kind of funding is intended to prevent.

The promise of these funding models, and something I know I've repeated over and over again, is that they help sustain games that may never have seen the light of day otherwise. There's a good chance that dozens of games you would have loved never got finished because of money, and the idea of being able to directly prevent that is incredibly appealing. But making a game isn't like making a table. Developers can't just go to the hardware store, price out the materials and end up with an accurate figure plus tax. Even comparatively small games take a long time and a lot of work to make, and something that seemed straightforward on paper might turn out to be more complicated than expected. It might hang them up for weeks. There are lots of unexpected things that can come out of nowhere and trip up even experienced developers... And the clock doesn't stop ticking just because progress has stalled.

When it comes to Kickstarter they could always round their estimates up, but the higher the goal the more risk that they'll fail to meet it and leave empty-handed. Go the Early Access route, and the trickle of cash coming in from Steam's increasingly saturated market may be utterly unsustainable. 

Do both, and they'll be called greedy.

But this isn't even the biggest problem with the proliferation of crowdfunding in game development. As much as this kind of funding fails to accommodate the fluidity of development and its expenses, it also fails to account for humans. Humans who don't get along, who have differing opinions, who get sick, who lose interest, who burn out. There's no real 'out' for developers caught in these circumstances, and the smaller the team, the more vulnerable they are. This is almost certainly why there are several cases of crowdfunded games that have fizzled because their developers seemed to just vanish into thin air. It's typically painted by burned players as the developers running off with the money, and there are probably a few cases where that's accurate. But imagine being locked into finishing something you were passionate about 2 years ago, no matter how you feel about it now or how your circumstances have changed.

And sometimes ideas just don't work out. Sometimes an inexperienced dev makes a naive promise, or an experienced dev makes an optimistic one. Sometimes features and even whole projects get scrapped not because of money, not because of people, but just because they don't work. And again, in the crowdfunding model there just isn't any room for this. No matter what, they're expected to deliver their product.

And they should be, because customers have already paid for it.

As sympathetic as I am, I'm not taking the side of developers who set lofty goals and fail to meet them, nor do I want to defend people who release a half-finished game and vanish. The point is that we as consumers need to seriously reconsider what we expect when we hand over money for an unfinished game, for the sake of both our wallets and our fragile little gamer hearts. It is never a certainty that that game will see full release with all the promised features. Frankly, it's not even a certainty that it will see more than a couple cursory updates.

I've put over 200 hours into Starbound even though it is still technically an unfinished game. If they stopped development tomorrow I would be upset, but I would still feel like I'd gotten my money's worth. I would still keep playing -- but I can't say that of every game I've bought on Early Access. I still sigh mournfully about Cube World's ambiguous fate every few months or so, though I can't bring myself to uninstall it.

And maybe that's the best way to think about crowdfunding games. Buy if you think it's worth the money in its current state, or if you believe so ardently in what the developers are trying to do that you want to support them regardless of what you'll get for it. Unless you're prepared to risk some heartbreak, don't buy access to an unfinished game thinking only about what it will be and not what it currently is. There are so many points of failure in between the two, and so little you can do about any of them.

Tweet

Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Iggy]

The much-touted, oh-so-promising Clang! sword-fighting game just up and vanished, Neil Stephenson and all. But it was $25 on a crap-shoot for me. I rolled snake eyes.

[irihapeti]

"don't buy access to an unfinished game thinking only about what it will be and not what it currently is."

^^ that

[Fab]

Thank you so much for this article. There's been all kind of arguments made regarding the issue and way too much of it is really harsh judgments from people who don't understand that with a changing industry, definitions and expectations must evolve (on both sides) as well lest everything ends up in bitterness.

I'm lucky in that two years after I started work on Winterfall and despite going through every step of the indie dev nightmare, my commitment to attaining my goal is intact but that too did require lots of self-work and a certain sense of realism and self-preservation.

Anyways, I really thank you for the balanced and empathetic nature of your article where you are able to look at the matter from both angles of customer and a developer. Healthy and refreshing read!

[geometry dash]

One of the best retro looking games that I ever seen is Geometry Dash, his creator "Robert" do and incredible work and I'm waiting for the next update 2.1!

[aliexpress pc]

Looks great but, I love that kind of ideas, crowfunding for newbies programers of games is a very nice plan.

[clahs of clans hack]

Thank you so much for this article, that's a healthy and refreshing read!

[Walter Sobchak]

Its two way mirror. Early access can give us a masterpiece like Starbound and FTL, but most early access games are crap

[brawl stars apk]

This game is good, not crap like many others.