The thing devs don't realize is early access also kills any chance of your launch being more successful. A lot of amazing games have died because of EA / Alpha Testing. Truth is no matter how much you stress it, no matter how true it may be, what you show gamers is exactly what majority will believe your game will be on release. Bugs, unfinished content, all of it stands as it is once you put it up for a price. Plus people get bored of your game when it's not even finished, as a dev I rather have them experience everything on the first play through.
I played an MMO a long time ago called Chronicles of Spellborn & saw it die to this. First fully action based MMO ever released, even more so than a lot of action rpgs I see these days. They opened their servers for alpha stress test. They only had 2-3 zones and no dungeon content yet. Everyone asked where dungeons were and where the endgame was then left saying the game was shit, also at that time people played it standing still because MMOs never had free-combat controls. After that happened the dev team basically fell apart, they essentially bailed out of spellborn. That game also had the best alpha release I've ever seen. An MMO that had no server lag with mass players in one spot running on full blown action controls, ugh. That's actually something you don't see today, multiplayer coding for that needs to be quite stellar to pull off.
ebacho20 karma
The thing devs don't realize is early access also kills any chance of your launch being more successful. A lot of amazing games have died because of EA / Alpha Testing. Truth is no matter how much you stress it, no matter how true it may be, what you show gamers is exactly what majority will believe your game will be on release. Bugs, unfinished content, all of it stands as it is once you put it up for a price. Plus people get bored of your game when it's not even finished, as a dev I rather have them experience everything on the first play through.
I played an MMO a long time ago called Chronicles of Spellborn & saw it die to this. First fully action based MMO ever released, even more so than a lot of action rpgs I see these days. They opened their servers for alpha stress test. They only had 2-3 zones and no dungeon content yet. Everyone asked where dungeons were and where the endgame was then left saying the game was shit, also at that time people played it standing still because MMOs never had free-combat controls. After that happened the dev team basically fell apart, they essentially bailed out of spellborn. That game also had the best alpha release I've ever seen. An MMO that had no server lag with mass players in one spot running on full blown action controls, ugh. That's actually something you don't see today, multiplayer coding for that needs to be quite stellar to pull off.
Anyways, good job not doing EA :P.
edit: brain fart mid-sentence
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