“Play It Three Days Early” Needs to Stop

I'm starting a campaign for playing it three days late

I'd pick up the deluxe edition of a game if it came with the season pass/full future DLC bundle bundled in at launch - if it had early access thrown in or not. I wonder how many others are skewing the numbers like myself?

Imagine buying Cyberpunk 2077 three days early so that you could enjoy not being able to run it before anyone else.

Editing in Mario footage feels a touch unfair. Nintendo deserves its fair share of criticism, but not over this flavour of predation at least. But I appreciate your positive spin in that you chose to shine a light on Yacht Club for releasing a high quality and finished product. Even the already patched bugs found by players have been fairly niche or minor, utterly astounding for the mechanical complexity on display. Much like with Team Cherry or Billy Basso or Mossmouth or Vanillaware, we should take the time to celebrate those who go the extra mile to treat the consumer right.

Oh man, Mindmaze? I have literally not thought about that game in nearly 3 decades!! That really unlocked some old memories.

I do agree that this is all very dumb and predatory. Especially for a single player games. But let me suggest a possible upside for a multiplayer game. Specifically big multiplayer games. How many times have we seen the servers being completely on fire at launch? This lets you stagger the launch window out over a few days, giving the engineers time to stress test, monitor, and react to server load so that they reduce the risk of Diablo 3's Error 37... which despite only lasting a very short time, dominated the news and discussion for weeks. Is it enough to justify this? Probably not. But it is at least something good that could come out of something bad.

Hmm, sympathetic though I am to people who HAVE to play early for reviews, I find it hard not to think that if people are being suckered by FOMO. for the sake of three days..it's kinda on them. Maybe that's a bit unfair of me. I wonder how long an Early Play window could be pushed before the cost/benefit to devs flipped. 30 days?

Anyway, subscribe to our Patreon for exclusive first access to videos a week before they go on YouTube! (I’m joking of course, but this model is in way more places than just games)