In perspective: Steam Early Access

In perspective: Steam Early Access

What you’ve heard

So now we are supposed to pay FULL PRICE for games that are not even finished yet and test buggy beta builds for free? You would have to be the stupidest person alive to fall for this! It’s obviously just Steam trying to grab a quick buck on projects that are so doomed to fail they can’t even afford to finish the development cycle. What a joke! Who would EVER do this? Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go pre-purchase INJUSTICE and fund a project on Kickstarter.

In Reality

It’s not really a great time to be a gamer. In the good old days we had a very simple system where we could give publishers money for a cartridge that sat on the store shelf, and you went home and popped it in your system to play. Then one day GameStop decided it was sick of Wal-Mart making money off video games while Activision decided it was sick of people not buying its shitty games. A brilliant plan was launched: pre-order a few choice Activision games before anyone knew they were shitty, and get beta access to Call of Duty as “a pre-order bonus” ... but only if you bought it at GameStop. Although this likely wasn’t the first ever example of this, it was one of the game changers, and from this point on every major release became a game of one-upmanship with Wal-Mart and GameStop securing deals for exclusive in-game bonuses if you pre-order the game before its release at their location. Still, pre-orders were not a horrible system for the gamer. They were small, generally $10 to $20, and they could be refunded. Things didn’t totally go to hell until Amazon came along and did what Amazon does; ruin everything for everyone.

Amazon has a vested interest in you not wanting a boxed game, as shipping is not cheap. They started attaching pre-order bonuses exclusively with digital copies of the game. Your digital pre-order wasn’t refundable, so Amazon quickly moved to a system of pre-purchase; give us the FULL selling price today and buy the digital copy, which will unlock when the game is released. Amazingly Wal-Mart and GameStop followed suit, offering the option to fully pay for your physical game before it was released (although still offering the more traditional pre-order option as well). Today, this practice is the standard, offered by EA through Origin, Steam, Ubisoft through Uplay, and by all major retailers.

By the time we got Kickstarter, we just didn’t know any better. We were already so used to paying for games before they came out that we didn’t notice that Kickstarter wasn’t even asking us to pay for something; it was asking us to give people money in the hopes there might be something to buy one day. Kickstarter offers no guarantee of a finished project and even when sold as “for $20, you get a copy of this game when it is released” the guys making that game are in no way obligated to release it. As anyone who backed “Haunts: The Manse Macabre” can tell you, sometimes all you get for your money is the developer telling you they were stupid to try and make the game in the first place. No refunds.

We are already paying for games before we get them and have been for years.

So what’s the deal?

Hey, even when everyone is already getting screwed, it’s disappointing to see someone jump on the screwing us band wagon, so the Steam Early Access announcement is getting a lot of negative press. However, it really shouldn't be, if for no other reason than that Steam has been doing pre-purchase for years. If you believe Gabe (and you have no reason not to, seeing as the man has always been true to his word) he’s using it to try and pressure developers who are already getting your money long before the game is released to give you something for that money right away. This isn’t new; the pre-order bonus for Fable 3 and Bioshock 3 both included mini-games that could be played immediately and were extremely successful. This isn’t altruism obviously; Steam has a vested interest in people being online playing Steam games seeing as they use the service to advertise upcoming releases and sales, and the first time a developer misses a release window with a game that the masses pre-purchased you can bet Steam will be the only poor suckers offering anyone refunds. (Oh wait, that already happened with “Stick of Truth.”). If the players already have a build to play, next time this happens they can get away from being asked for refunds.

Early Access is currently only supporting a small number of independent developers who would agree to the terms, and the games you’re going to find in the program are hardly beta quality. They are fully playable games missing the last bits of refinement that go into video games (traditionally menus, GUI, and sound). I would encourage anyone to check it out.