I despise Kickstarter.

[That Norwegian Guy]

The following statement will conflict with the title: I love Kickstarter.

 

I love that so many indie games can be funded that previously never would have.

 

But I truly despise Kickstarter - and by extension early access on Steam - because MMO developers are using it as an excuse to monetize alpha testing, something that is and should be a professional endeavour, and also because of actual publishers using it to create budget-cushions for games they were going to fund anyway.

 

For example Archeage, which, while not funded on Kickstarter, has long since finished testing in Korea. Hell, it's 2 years old already! Trion are dragging their feet so they can suck some of that sweet early access juice out of it, with weak excuses like "we're handpicking our launch content" and other miserable assorted lies.

 

I've been an MMORPG guild leader for 8 years now, in that time I had a credible, reputable and professional alpha testing group together who actually coordinated, interacted with, and supported the developers directly. Hell, it's not even been 4 years since we ran raids in Rift with actual developers on our Teamspeak. And we have similar memories from Age of Conan, The Secret World, Warhammer Online and more.

 

Right about this time, I should be alpha testing World of Darkness, and it may have been a rare and final opportunity. But for unrelated reasons, that won't be happening.

 

70% of the best memories I had gaming came from MMORPG alphas; small, tight knit communities of people with a joint passion for the game.

 

Now, post-kickstarter, the term "alpha" is just another casualty, It doesn't exist anymore.

 

It's sad.

 

/rant over

[Sexy Vanilla Freshness]

Steam Early Access ~ Kickstarter

 

I agree that the recent monetization of alphas has become ridiculous, look at DayZ for instance.

[That Norwegian Guy]

Steam Early Access ~ Kickstarter

 

Steam Early Access is a direct result of Kickstarter.

[Sexy Vanilla Freshness]

Steam Early Access is a direct result of Kickstarter.

 

I see them as one and the same for the most part, except with Kickstarter it is not necessary for the game to be in a playable state at the time of starting to take money. where as I believe Steam's Early Access does require it to be at least playable from what I've seen.

[Sauron]

Well, there's a solution for this... stop throwing them your money like there's no tomorrow. Then the problem will fix itself. Same goes for everything else: don't like battlelog for bf4 and the fact that it's full of bugs and has 60$ of day one dlc? Don't buy it. Don't like the fact that watch dogs was purposefully nerfed for pc an performed like absolute crap? Don't buy it. Had enough of the "gta v not coming to pc for more than a year because we want to milk older hardware first" bs? Don't. Buy. It.

(not directed at op but more generally to the gaming community)

 

Quake 2 still rules