The early access debacle

 

I think if there is one sensation that consuming gamers are most sensitive to, a feeling which we react the strongest against, it would be the inkling that at some point a decision to be lazy was made with the products that we pay money to access. And I think it bears emphasising the monetary investment that gamers commit into these relationships before continuing, just in case the knee-jerk cry of 'entitlement' is made. (Never could understand how that term entered the Game Journalist lexicon so long ago.) And this comes to blows greatly with publishers who long to half-ass everything about the game creation and marketing process to the best of their collective abilities. It's a great game of checks and balances for which both sides are guilty of letting the ball drop every now and then.

One of the more recent slip-ups that I can think of on behalf of us has been the way we've fully allowed the 'Early Access' meta to take hold. Essentially we're talking about situations where brand new games that are entirely finished have their release date held off by a couple of days so that those fresh thirty six hours can be bundled on top of a special edition and sold out. Now that sounds hugely cynical and weak- except for the fact that these publishers know very well how to exploit the audience to get what they want. Maybe you have an audience that would very much like to play this game during the weekend, but you delay the global launch to Wednesday? See the arm twist, watch the ants scramble to their wallets. It's the way of this twisted world.

But it's lazy to try and squeeze extra money out of people like this. Even more lazy than the typical Ubisoft method of cutting out a couple of missions, throwing together a random skin and calling that thirty extra dollars worth of content. You're literally trying to package time away from people. How utterly pathetic. Still, at least it's relatively harmless. I mean- you really have to posses no control over your faculties to really be pushed into spending 1.5 times the price you are usually willing to over a three-day head start for a single player game. And as for the developers themselves this is totally easy money that they would have to be utterly gibbering morons to screw up. Wait... oh, how long until Ubisoft screw this up? Wait- they did already. Didn't they?

That's right! Remember how the formula is supposed to work? You sell the illusion of early access by a few days or even a week to people by really delaying the global launch and letting people pay to access the real launch day. That's how you handle this if you're not a dangerously incompetent buffoon. But what if I told you that Ubisoft- the butt of evolution themselves- actually gave people access to the early unfinished build of Star Wars Outlaw and watched it sincerely bite them in the ass? How could a company be that unbelievably stupid? And what kind of light in this going to end up shining in what I honestly consider to be the industries least destructive modern grift- monetising time?

First off you should know that giving out early access to games ain't anything new. Reviewers are never given completed builds of games but rather get the gold version before the final finishing touches that are stapled onto release via a day one patch. Might not be the ideal 'completionists' way to finish a project but it's the way that modern game design has worked for at least the last ten to fifteen years by now. This period of time between gold and release is a haven for bugs, crashes, optimisation issues and all the other things that journalist have to choose whether or not to include in their reviews as the studio promises all will be right by launch day. This is what you don't let the consumers see. It's less than finished- this isn't viewing ready.

You see where I'm going with this- Ubisoft let customers into this period of time with their expensive early access bundle and in doing so subjected their heaviest spending customers to a litany of bugs and mismatched polish to sour their experience. Ontop of that, they managed to defeat the entire purpose of a 'headstart' by publishing a day one patch so transformative that anyone who did play the game in that window would be required to totally erase that save and start from scratch or else face fatal progression bugs that could and would leave them incapable of finishing the game. Taking back the time that they sold without compensation. Totally ruining the deal. Ubisoft just pulled off a scam of incompetence. How very like them.

Now steps have been made to 'make things right' in the loosest sense of those words. Ubisoft first just handed out a 'sorry' message, before having their arm twisted by the backlash into actually doing something tangible about what was essentially a grift. Now they offer- 100 dollars worth of within ecosystem currency- which is utterly hilarious. Essentially Ubisoft have offered literally nothing up, currency that can only be spent within their digital environment, and are calling that a boon. A mercy. Instead of giving people, oh I don't know, a differential refund? That extra thirty I spent to waste my time would definately look better in my bank account- but oh no- Ubisoft would prefer you spend that on digital cosmetics please! What a total disgrace.

I can only imagine the distrust this will engender towards early access schemes which may even see them shrivel and become less common- which sucks because I honestly don't think this is anywhere near the worst grift trend that the industry has pulled. Taking advantage of the impatient to play a game two days early for twice the price of admission is meaningless to the everyday person and a great way to reel in whales with more money than sense- it takes nothing of value out of the game itself and keeps the ghouls in charge still feeling like their stealing from their customers: which is all they strive for out of life. Leave it up to the utter wases of sentience at Ubisoft to screw it all up by being unfathomably  useless cosmic jokes on humanity.