this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Early Access is just "release". Only the devs openly admit ahead of time the game is buggy and unfinished, and promise - as always - to fix it up and add the missing parts.
Often they do. Sometimes they don't.
TBH it's ultimately nothing but a shitty buggy release, but the honesty of making that known ahead of time buys a whole lot of goodwill. It should be the default, that any publisher releasing a game that is not finished - so most AAA nowadays - marks it as Early Access, openly declaring the unfinished part.
It's also very different from a beta version, which is usually feature and content complete (otherwise it's generally called an alpha). Early Access versions are often very early in the development process, they're feature-complete-ish, but never or rarely content complete, usually just starting out on that. This works exceedingly well for games that need "just more stuff", but can miss the mark on games that need underlying systems reworked as this ires the existing playerbase and splits it.
I disagree, big publishers do not deserve early access, they have money to pay for QA, it's a gross misuse of the feature.
Early access isn't necessarily different from a beta version, it's just the name of the program used by devs to generate some revenue and get feedback during development. The game can be in alpha or beta or whatever.
Personally, I avoid games in early access on principle (with a couple exceptions) as I would rather play them once they are completed.
Same, I got little enough gaming time, might as well play it once it's in its best state and play something else before that.