"Early Access" forever. 7 worst practices of publishers and developers
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Developers who take the right advantage of Early Access can sell their games while they're still being developed and polished, ruling out the risks posed by investing a huge amount of money up front. They can get funding for specific production goals, even if the deadlines are sometimes slightly longer. However, some projects seem to be stuck there forever. Something still seems to be going on with them, but there's also a long, long way to achieve the ultimate goals and fulfill all the promises. Sometimes it's possible to get out of this early access purgitory, as exemplified by the icon of this very phenomenon, DayZ. Except that the release of version 1.0 at a completely different time, when the zombie fad was long gone, wasn't a huge success.
The most notable games stuck in early access are Escape from Tarkov and Star Citizen. In case of these, the original release date has passed literally years ago, and you still won't be able to find many of the advertised elements and mechanics. But these titles have evolved in the meantime. The creators focused on completely new goals, new content, often faster and easier to do. Items that would normally be part of a sequel or even a DLC are added to the queue of pending elements, without any clear vision of the estimated time of completion of the project. Suffice it to say that in the most expensive version of Escape from Tarkov, sold in pre-order since August 2016, there's still an annotation about Season Pass access and post-launch DLCs. Will the players ever see them?
When is the premiere? Who cares!? These games are fun anyhow...
Star Citizen, available in Early Access since... 2014, is one of the record holders, and at the same time it still enjoys a lot of interest and brings huge income. But among the best-selling unfinished games that have been on the market for years, we also have some less ambitious productions. Most of them are experiencing temporary popularity surges after a major update is released. This has recently been the case of Project Zomboid, which has been in Early Access since 2013. Some car games are closely following this game, including BeamNG.drive from 2015 and My Summer Car, which is twelve months younger.
