This really does not sound healthy. The game is released, for a certain amount of money. If people don’t like what they get for their money, they simply should not buy it.
But by now gamers have been so trained to expect to endless content treadmills and all their ilk like mtx and battle passes that publishers/developers get egged on if they don’t work on their game 24/7 and forever.
Remove ‘gamers’ and insert ‘bloated management’.
Gamers are not asking devs to work until burnout on social media or forums, that’s management and usually in person or department/company policy and procedure.
Edit: more specifically to the article for solo devs they are talking about critics complaining they should have made something bigger which is not a bad problem to have for securing funding for future games if people like your art enough to request more and doesn’t require working burnout hours.
Spend years releasing unfinished and incomplete work.
Gamers expect work to be unfinished and incomplete.
🫵
Don’t take early access money if you don’t plan to be giving frequent updates. It’s the nature of the beast.
People don’t expect constant updates from pokemon because when you buy it, it’s “a complete game”. They may drop patches and add content but it’s not expected the way it is from a game supposedly in active development like an early access game is.
It’s not expecting a complete package at the time of purchase. It’s expecting one in due time with your support.
What you are describing is a game outside of early access.
Why are those your expectations, then? Seems kind of illogical to look at a system with a history of not that, expect it, then be mad.
You can say it’s not right for it to happen, but to be expecting it just makes no sense at all. Again, I’ll reiterate, you can argue that the system is fucked and needs to change, but, again, expecting an outcome with evidence that it won’t happen, then get mad, is asinine
Nah screw that… don’t buy early access games if you don’t think it’s worth it in it’s current state.
Naw screw that. Don’t label it early access if you don’t plan to update it from its current state at a rate that the majority of your fan base expects.
That said the dev in this article has provided 3 updates in 3 months. They’re totally fine by the expectations of all but the most unreasonable people.
Or just don’t buy a game with expectations that don’t match reality and then get mad at other people.
Typical gamer brain rot
Both are true though.
If you want to release your game in Early Access, you should expect to update the game and community frequently.
If you want to buy a game (early access or not), take a look if it’s what you want to play right now, never buy any game, software, service or device that is promising the functionality you want will be coming later. If it does come later, buy it then, never buy on promises.
Every single aspect of video game development is trash. From executives to absurdly whiney and entitled gamer population.
Sorry, but I for one am not going to accept these companies blaming everything on gamers. I’m not into bootlicking. Gamers are annoying af for sure, but I’m not blaming systemic industry problems on gamers. That’s complete horseshit.
Who are “these companies”? Game publishers and developers certainly aren’t a monolith. To me, this publisher’s complaint seems like an implicit critique of how big publishers have trained gamers to have expectations that are unrealistic for all but the most high-profile games.
There are a lot of articles like this one lately saying Gamers don’t appreciate the products we’re given and that we complain too much. Those companies. All of them. Manor Lords is still Early Access on steam. If the developer can’t be bothered to develop his unfinished game while taking our money then that’s on him, not us.
We’re living in a “either 1 star or 5 stars” world. There’s no in between, and I fully understand that it can be frustrating and put immense pressure onto developers.
I don’t know the company behind this game, but I’m not giving them the 1 star review just because I assume every tiny company is bad as well as all the big companies.
What if there’s a boss that tries to protect his employees and sees the issue in extreme expectations?
Not saying it definitely is that way, but why assume the worst first?
Early access games are marketed as such, and it shouldn’t come with a suprise that it’s an unfinished game. Some do it better, some worse, but an early access title shouldn’t be treated with expectations that reflect a finished product.
I’m not a fan of most early access titles myself though, at least not early in development. I don’t want to help develop it, so I wait for an almost finished product.
Neither are gamers. They aren’t a monolith either. This article smacks of the "millennials kill billion dollar industry " nonsense. There’s definitely mitigating factors on both sides as far as the expectations during such transactions. When I pay for something that is promised to be complete I have an expectation in my mind that it will be completed. If it’s an early access beta, I spent the money to support that product and developer.
However a lot of developers big and small have engendered this reaction because they fall victim to the hype train. They market the game. People are interested. People’s interest begins to wain because the game is taking too long (cyber punk), or the company doesn’t want to lose the hype wave so they release even though the game isn’t finished (no mans sky, and cyber punk honestly), and this is what we get. On the other hand, we see the backlash that happens when games get canceled by larger studios. And we see smaller studios constantly miss their launch windows or expected release dates with little to no contact with the fan base or the public (Team Cherry/silksong).
It doesn’t matter if you’re an indie developer or a triple A studio, what most gamers want is a complete game at launch, or (in the case of an alpha/beta release) updates.
A vocal minority is being shitty here and the article is acting as if gamers are just getting together to hold developers big and small’s feet to the coals or something.
