While Baldur’s Gate 3 is being widely celebrated by fans and developers alike, some are panicking that this could set new expectations from fans. Good.

  • Pixel@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    EA is an immensely useful tool for game devs, the issue is EA as an excuse to ship unpolished games or to leave games unfinished forever. Neither of which are problems intrinsic to early access, they’re just bad business practice that should be shunned like any other

    • soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      As a gamedev: Early Access was useful for devs, back when it was real Early Access. Think: Kerbal Space Program (the first, not the second).

      Nowadays it’s mostly a marketing tool, that allows to generate the hype for launch twice… Publishers and players expect “Early Access” games to be feature complete and polished before the “Early Access” launch…

      • Maultasche@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I liked what Daemon X Machina did, where they released a demo, sent out questionnaires to everyone who downloaded it, published a video about the results save how they were planning to act on it, and a few months later released a new demo with a new questionnaire.

        • soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          Yep, that’s probably the most helpful thing for devs. This sadly often conflicts with publishers’ announcement schedules. There are, however, companies that do NDA-protected play-tests, where you get the same kind of information, without publicly announcing the game.

        • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Ubisoft did (does?) it to a degree with their Rainbow 6 TTS (beta) servers to test the sandbox and did so for a few technical alpha/beta releases acting as selected pewviews to see how the game is received and where bugs are.