I’ve seen many devs cite the refund window as why they don’t need to bother maintaining a demo. They’re wrong about not needing a proper demo, but people definitely do treat the refund window as a demo phase, not merely a technical test.
but early access was made so small teams (or solo devs) can not starve while working on a passion project.
It was not. As I said, Valve specifically warns devs in their info docs not to use early access for the money, because it won’t profit. And that’s incredibly obvious to pretty much anyone given how hard it is for any released game to get attention on Steam, and that most people do–and should–avoid buying early access games. Early access money is a small slice of nothing.
Yes, some devs still do it for money, despite all the evidence otherwise, but devs that go early access because they actually need the money to finish the game almost always fail their project, because that’s just a disastrously bad management choice.
Early access was created for feedback and hype/community building. Being in early access for a year gives you 12 months paid testing/feedback and invested players already there on launch day for Steam metrics to count, 12mo of organic social media growth plus chances to catch some actual influencers and whatnot, etc. You’d never see that just dropping the game on release day, without a ton more money in advertisement. Early access is to give a game a chance for the most positive launch day it can manage, if devs make their customers happy and fix bugs.
A project that needs early access money has already failed.
So, when a game releases, buyers get the option to partially refund or commit, and valve uses the commit money to pay the refunds, so devs only make money if they keep more than half of their buyers, and customers have to consciously deal with sinking money into a potentially failed project.
At least right now the abandoned games are still labelled early access.
Most early access failures eventually just call themselves released at some point, so we’re no better off as far as that.
Not charging until the game properly releases is normal. Most devs need to manage and deal with that, and beta testing used to be an expense on the devs. Now, the buyers are paying the devs to beta test, taking the project risk for the devs. Even if the system were free to both sides, it’s still beneficial to the devs, but without the corruption of thinking they should be making money during beta testing–money that they’ll happily keep as they walk away if their project fails to deliver what they sold.
There’s a more fair solution out there than letting devs just sell their games before they finish.
Which is fair. Most people should not buy early access, and should wait for the devs to declare their project release ready. Early access buying is all risk and responsibility (to post feedback, to update Steam review if it’s out of date withe the project, to understand the individual project’s development pace, etc), with a lot of factors a buyer should take into account, that most people genuinely should not need to care about or wait for.
There are an insane number of Steam games already released to buy and play.
I follow lots of early access devs, and it’s not uncommon for some devs to blatantly post updates only strategically, fixing some minor thing as the next seasonal Steam sale approaches. Some continue even after leaving early access: serious issues in bug report threads, but some minor fix gets posted as the sale approaches, clearly to make the game look alive, even though none of the big stuff is getting fixed.
Plenty of devs are their own business side, anymore.
It’s too short for most games I play, because they backload their interest and gameplay excessively. The first two hours are generally the worst example of the actual game. Frustrates me that devs don’t have the sense to make a demo that showcases the game instead of either nothing or just the beginning, but if a dev does the beginning and lets you carry your save into the full game, you can use the demo as intro and then buy with two more hours to put it through its paces (or already know you won’t need to refund). Still not a smart way to sell your game when the early game is worse and a more focused demo would more effectively and efficiently engage potential players who don’t want to sink time into every demo, but it’s a compromise solution for people who will spend time with the demo and not wander away without buying into the game if they had a good time.
Also, anything with a character creator or other such lengthy setup to get playing just doesn’t work with only two hours of running time as the window.