Paying To Play Early: Gaming's Sad New Scam (The Jimquisition)
Videogames are increasingly trying to get you to preorder or purchase expensive deluxe editions in exchange for "early access" to a game several days before its official launch date. This latest trend is a sure sign that, as publishers desperately try to keep squeezing blood from the same shriveled stone, they're running out of aggressive monetization schemes.
Paying To Play Early: Gaming's Sad New Scam (The Jimquisition) (YouTube)
Comments (9)
Train sim world has started doing this early access 5 days early with their annual "new game" thats the same as the one you already bought but if you want new stuff better pay the patch fee and get DLC you dont want, along with flow charts to work out which edition has stuff you might want annually. This year to get the patched version of the game the most expensive version at like £89 has the same content as the £56 edition but will get 4 mystery DLC's at some point maybe.
I pre-ordered Buldur's Gate 3 mainly for 4 day early release and played it maybe 7 hours during that time. Great game but i have bad impulse control.
Random thought: Can you see through the They Them goggles???
Pay extra so I can play a pre-patched broken game a mere week before most people, and therefore before most reviews have been posted? Sign me up, sailor!
I genuinely despise the idea of looking at the actions of complete strangers, generally without the benefit of much context, and in some way insinuating that they lack agency in their decision-making (whether it's saying they've been 'brain-washed,' calling them 'sheeple' or whatever else it might be) but, by Lathander the Morninglord, the fact that most of the "AAA" publishers still have millions of stalwartly loyal fans who will merrily pre-order their games practically sight unseen when they've spent over a decade being screwed over, time and again, in ever-more elaborate ways makes it hard not to be a massive, hypocritical jackass on that one. There are exceptions, obviously - I may never have played any of FromSoft's games but I know you get a complete experience (DLC that gives you new experiences in a setting you already love instead of plugging holes in the main experience is more than grand by me) and I know there's a broad consensus that you're getting very high quality. But the continuing existence let alone success of EA, ActiBlizz, Ubisoft and plenty of others in a world where there's so much great indie stuff out there (or just old classics that are still easily compatible with modern hardware that you missed first time around)... it genuinely, genuinely baffles me. Literally all you're getting now in exchange for practically everything else being vastly worse and vastly more expensive is more technically advanced graphics and bigger maps, and I struggle to believe that so many people, if they took a step back and thought about it, honestly think that's a trade-off worth considering.
As somebody a bit too obsessed with fashion, my immediate reaction to this video was "That jacket doesn't match that hat." Then Steph pointed out that it's like a bespoke stained-glass design with tactile plastic, and now I'm just HELLA JEALOUS.
Rude Ralph is a great co-host. He never interrupts Steph and offers insightful commentary.
There's one other thing I'd have added: early access is a negative value, really. I mean, perhaps there's a value for multiplayer games so that players can get XP and loot earlier than others...but it's really more of a liability at this point because game devs are generally pretty terrible about QA. It's not just paying for 'early' access to a game, it's that the game is, more likely than not, broken. Games are almost always worthless before the first major service pack that comes out 2-3 months after the game launch, frequently with a discount. I finally bought a copy of Cyberpunk 2077 last week. It's been about three years since its release and it's *finally* playable, with a major content pack included...and I bought it for half the launch price. Why, oh why...would I pay extra for an early release, when there's no reasonable expectation (let alone a guarantee) that the game will be *playable*?
Very well said. I think the reason is that it was *an* answer to the very real problem: How do we help small dev studios to get paid for their work without going deep into debt? I wish I had a good answer to that question, the best I've been able to do is donate. But yeah. Early access was an answer that seemed (to me at the time, at least) like maybe it could help, but has just been abused by larger publishers and straight-up scam artists to the point where it's just a bug, not a feature.