Honest advertising can fix the perception problem. Just outright tell people that it has crashes and/or other bugs and misses content right from the start. Provide a playable demo of the current state. Or relax the refund period to GOG’s 30 days-no-questions-asked.

Early Access is great for games which are already fun to play but unfinished. For that the game needs to be in alpha or beta.
Funding the alpha is what Kickstarter is for.

I’ve treated many games in early access like normal games and had lots of fun - which I would call successful purchases. To me EA means that not all content is there, the game is unfinished but playable. It works better for some games than others:

Timberborn in EA was playable completely and since its a sandbox, hard to notice missing content. Similar with Factorio, Valheim and Rust (I actually miss EA Rust a bit).

Hades, Baldur’s Gate 3 were story heavy games so they did rely on being complete. Maybe a little less so for Hades. They were good experiences, but I kept playing them at a minimum and waited for full release.

I think “early access” is more informative to non-techy people than “beta” is. Though an even more informative term would be “unfinished.”

It depends how you use it.

If you put out a game that works but hasn’t got all its art assets yet then it looks like you’re basically just releasing the game early.

If you put out a game which only has its first two levels and upon completion of level 2 it has some text that says “more to come” people understand that’s an early access.

But there’s way too many of the first example and not enough of the second example. None of this is helped by games like No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield that released in buggy states, making people think that early access just means broken.

Early Access makes them money so it’s now a way to make money even before your game is done. Originally it was to help infuse cash to finish the title without needing investors.

I can’t believe Valheim just left EA. It’s literally been over 5 years!

And tons of people said exactly that would happen the day it was announced.

Early access is like a Gachapon. You may get something you like, you might get trash. The trash might become great years later or on the contrast you might hate what you liked beforehand with final-ish changes. It’s a gamble, even triple A companies do this. Games like Fallout 4 or WoW changed the game to prepare for their new games or dlc that’s to be released.

Early Access, Beta, 1.0 release… It’s all just a stay of mind to me.

Now-a-days software is either being actively developed; Or it’s sunsetted and ends up in the hands of retro enthusiasts.

No reality is not so black and white and there are exceptions. Yadda yadda yadda…

Personally I treat early access like kickstarters at this point, I just avoid them by and large because of the rampant issues with delivery.

Unless the policy changes for early access and allow me to request a full refund if the game is abandoned and allow for something like a week of evaluation after 1.0 to determine if crap was released, I doubt I would buy most early access games at this point.

The biggest issue I have is with devs releasing games for full price in early access then to never finish it (like ksp2) or just spam it with new content instead of fixing bugs (like Ark). In most cases it’s not the player base treating it like it’s a finished game, it’s the devs selling it as a nearly finished game (while it’s not even at a playtesting state) then to move on onto a new project as soon as sales drop leaving it unfinished, scamming the players.

Steam early access became an excuse to release unfinished junk. The sport for devs is to create content which is a bit over 2 hours, so it’s past the refund period. Think of long loading screens, unskippable intro videos and conversations, long waiting time for connecting to servers etc, extremily long unskippable instructions during the mandatory tutorial, so the actual crappy gameplay won’t be seen within the first 2 hours.

There are also devs that do try and mean well, they usually sell the game at a discount in early access to compensate the player base for bug testing for them (like ksp1).

Sadly the majority are just scammers.

How does Steam even allow paid DLC content for an early access game… Wtf.

People just buy an early access game like they buy a normal game and treat it like that’s the game."

As they should tbh

They shouldn’t buy it based on future expectations that may never arrive

They should buy and okay it for what it is.

If it gets even better. Great. If not, they know what they paid for going in.

I find that playing early access as a normal game, for some genres, is… idk, good? Better?

Like games like timberborn and whiskerwood and other base-building or colony-building games that I obsess over. Getting to try those in their early stages is awesome because people start modding them early just for a change of pace over what they already play. Then a lot of those mods end up being features in the game, which sort of makes the whole thing a group project, which is genuinely awesome. Probably also helps push them to 1.0.

If you happen to be a sort who likes mods, and like those sort of games, getting into them early can be a decent opportunity to influence the development path of the game, even if its only in a small way. And if you aren’t a modder, its low-key fun to watch how new features get added to the game as new versions come out.

As long as they are playable enough to mod, everything else can (and probably will) be added by the player base, even if the project gets abandoned, but that requires people playing them as if they were done - why would you mod a game you wouldn’t want to play for hundreds of hours?

It feels like it’s a license to disappoint customers with how some studios use it.

I tend to forget tehy exist, then see someone say “There’s a 1.0 release!” like just popped up for Valheim.

I mean I did the same with PalWorld, though…

The pathing was so atrocious I gave up and didn;t bother trying again until the 1.0 release.

But I bought that more to say “Fuck You!” to Nintendo than for itself :P