Releasing unfinished games as complete. 7 worst practices of publishers and developers
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Since the concept of "early access" was established, the creators have probably started to take too much liberty with people's willingness to play video games as soon as possible. On the one hand, we players making a conscious decision to buy a game officially labelled as "incomplete," without some of the announced mechanics; that's clearly stated on the Steam card. On the other hand – there's the exploited practice of publishing games that are supposedly finished, but quickly turn out to be underdeveloped beta versions. These would customarily be full of bugs, and the lack of content is explained by these products still being "work-in-progress."
The funny thing here is that these early-access games are often coming from big publishers, who theoretically should be able to afford to prepare the development of all their games in advance, making sure all the correct steps are taken. Only later it may become apparent that these projects were mismanaged, without a coherent vision, with unrealistic goals. The desire to recover at least some of the invested money, to meet deadlines and contracts, means that such games are released anyway, despite being undercooked. After all, it's the largest, longest-operating publishers that should be expected to provide the most refined productions.
No Man's Sky – a symbol of premature release
No Man's Sky is perhaps the most famous example of a game that was released way too early. The players received an indie game full of bugs, without many elements promised in advertising materials, such as... the entire multiplayer mode, or huge spaceships.
Disappointed customers accused the developers of Hello Games of outright lying and deliberately misleading them. Meanwhile, the team many difficulties during the production, including a flooding of their entire studio. Expectations for well-marketed game from Sony were extremely high, and the subsequent delay of the release even resulted in the death threats addressed to the lead designer, Sean Murray.
Despite the bad start, the creators didn't give up and persistently introduced the promised elements in time, with subsequent updates. Over time, No Man's Sky turned into an excellent game all-around, but it took a fair bit of time to achieve that. Maybe it just came out too early?
