This is bad.

[Chairman_Tiel]

Yay for selling unfinished games at retail!

Early Access has been a thing for a while now - the concept of buying an incomplete product in the goal of aiding development along is something that's been present since Minecraft's wild success with it. That said, surprising amounts of controversy have accompanied its adoption. The most common complaint is that once a developer has a consumer's money, they don't need to do anything. Unlike Mojang's smash hit, many setups are content to merely accept revenue from these pre-order/alpha-access bundles and proceed to either push out a grossly unfinished and/or rushed product, if that. See titles like Legends of Pegasus or Gnomoria for relevant examples. In essence, investing in an Early Access game is more often than not a good way to get burned, with few exceptions.

Up to this point it's confined itself to digital platforms like Steam, where at least a good percentage of consumers are in a position to assess the risks of 'taking the plunge' via online reviews or even Steam's new (and quite useful) reviews system. This, however, has changed.



This is an unfinished game being sold in a retail store. Would you pay the price of a steak for a turkey leg? Would you even give a half-baked cake a second glance in the deli, with the promise 'it'll be finished later'? Up to this point beta access games have had the excuse of being purely digital media up to release, thus negating these analogies, but no longer. This is a very tangible, very physical, and very deceptive object. Yes, deceptive, at least now when its compatriots in the PC Games section are all finished games without a half-assed promise on the front. You may ask, "what's the big deal, PA's team has been top notch!" and that's not something I'd argue. For what it's worth they've done a great job of fulfilling that which was expected of them by early backers. Yet the issue lies not with this specific title, but overall. Planetary Annihilation is setting a dangerous precedent for a path I myself would not like to see the industry go down.

[Vinyl]

I agree, while Uber are very unlikely to not finish their game, it's frightening to think what other, less reliable *cough* EA *cough* companies/devs might do with a market for unfinished products.

[Iv121]

Its the fault of the fools who buy them, we can't really do a lot against it, just like we can't do anything to solve the stale game market stuch on sequels ...

[Shadowcatbot]

Lolwut, they're selling an alpha version on disk? That's beyond stupid first off, what the hell is the point of the disk? It's just going to give you an old exe file that requires updating and two, didn't we move past hard copies of shit since like steam?


It will be interesting to see how much flak they get for this.

[Iv121]

none.

[Professor Fenway]

I fucking hate this decision as well. Why? They are also selling a commander exclusively with the physical copy, OUTSIDE of the commanders they already promised!

It's bullshit and a bad move.

[Shadowcatbot]

Weren't they selling a commander exclusively with the alpha online too? I thought you only gave put extra stuff to those who spent more cash on the alpha then the "final product".

[Professor Fenway]

There are those, yes. I'm fine with that.

The problem is NOBODY else gets this commander, no matter how much money you threw at the kickstarter, unless you buy the physical copy.

It's like paid DLC.

[Shadowcatbot]

There are those, yes. I'm fine with that.

The problem is NOBODY else gets this commander, no matter how much money you threw at the kickstarter, unless you buy the physical copy.

It's like paid DLC.

I don't know anymore. PA is being weird.
On the bright side in probably 20 years physical copies of crap will probably phase out or at least be replaced by super tiny jump drives instead of flimsy CD disks.

[Pat22]

"it's nice that you're giving us money so we can finish our game but we're going to spend that money to make the unfinished game be distributed on CDs in game retail stores so that we can make more money"

[҉]

Urrr. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, but I don't understand why they'd do it. What does it get them? I can't imagine that today, in 2014, they're going to sell anywhere near as many physical game discs as they will fully digital copies. I'm surprised it's worth the cost of manufacturing and distributing physical merchandise, especially for a game that already has a huge following in the digital distribution arena. I don't think selling physical copies of alpha games is any better or worse than distributing them digitally, for Planetary Annihilation or any other game. I guess the issue is that people might not realize they were buying an unfinished product, but that's true online as well--either way, the result is a customer with a copy of the game. There's less information available to customers in physical stores, but really, anybody who just wanders into a store and buys a game they know nothing about is setting themselves up to get burned no matter what. If this is an economically sound move for the developers, fine.

That they're offering exclusive content with it is a different issue. My understanding is that the different commanders are purely cosmetic, but if you're one of the people who payed hundreds of dollars via the kickstarter, it's got to rankle a bit. It is very much like paid DLC, as Fenway said, which doesn't have to be bad; lots of games have paid DLC. But it's something that, like so many things, can be done well or scummily. DLC should be extra content that's not necessary for the game that either the developers didn't have time to add or that wasn't thought worth it until they knew the game would be a success and they wanted to add later. DLC that's released at the same time as the base game always struck me as a * move, especially when the game itself cost $60, which I think is absurd; I've never paid nearly that much for a game, which is one reason I tend to play stuff on a couple-year delay. Bundling lots of things in with lots of other things in such a way that it isn't really possible to get all of them (who the hell is going to buy multiple copies of a game) is a scummy way to do it. Games that have DLC that's much more expensive than the game itself is a scummy way to do it (Mass Effect was like that. I eventually got stuff on sale, but getting all the DLC for ME2 and ME3 costs about three times what getting the games themselves does). SoaSE did DLC well; there are a couple of little packs that are in no way necessary for the game but nicely expand on some features and offer some new gameplay. More games should do that. Planetary Annihilation looks like a very cool game in a lot of ways, but some of their behind-the-scenes stuff seems a bit iffy. This is one of those things.

[ACH0225]

I feel like disks are akin to hardcover books. They look nice, and they show how cool you are, but there are other, cheaper options.