Everyone here claiming early access strategy is a bad one has to explain why so many games (be it successful or not) do it. The reason is pretty simple - this grants you more profits and faster polished game due to player’s feedback.
People still whine and complain about error37 years later and you want ea-… No, wait, “demand” early access. Really bold and makes you think. What about crowd funding D4 while you’re at it too?
They pressured into revealing their hand early once and they had records of how unprepared they were for mass sales with D3 at the past, they ain’t gonna fell for that for the second time. Most you can expect would be a closed-open beta.
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Exactly the reason why D3 would have been a disaster whenever released. The idea of perfectly polished game is illusory.
Because it is cheap advertisement. And an income source during development.
Super relevant for indie developers. Unsurprisingly, most early access games are indie games.
Less relevant for billion dollar companies.
Customers are also more forgiving toward indie devs releasing lower quality games.
Anyway, the point here was not about early access. It was about releasing a bad, unfinished game.
If you release a finished quality game and call it “beta” or “Early access”, then ther reception will be better.
Yeah. Early access is basically the natural progression of crowdfunding (which also offers cheap advertisement and an early income source). Still not very relevant for a billion dollar company.
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D4 Alpha is far from a bad game.
It’s nothing beyond a shareware or demo either. You’re asking them to sell a pre-alpha version for real money directly skipping the open-closed beta phase.
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How would you know? 
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Wasn’t PoE’s launch generally well-received (if only because it picked up the slack of D3)? I remember it being solid and everything I expected, but I started losing interest once I started finding gems, because I couldn’t figure them out at a glance to know whether they are expendable or that I would rather stockpile them endlessly. I stopped playing Guild Wars 2 over similar inventory woes (and there’s no way that I’m junking all of these one-of-a-kind seasonal items! but they just keep coming…).
But I recently downloaded PoE again (then again a week later, when they overhauled their entire data structure…!), as PoE was always a well-established footnote in my mind if nothing else. I’m not privy to how much of PoE had been completely gutted & reworked since it launched (vs. an endless content dump into a consistent receptacle that worked since the beginning), but I’m guessing less than D3 which I argue would otherwise be well into its second expansion by now.
Yes, that would be better than delaying the game.
From best to worst option:
1] Late 2021, before Cyberpunk Online
2] Right now, as is
3] Delayed until polished
That’s what I meant. Those players wanting a fully polished game can simply start playing D4 at later stage.
But the difference is PoE’s launch was well-received while D3’s launch was a circus.
Yet PoE launch for you personally wasn’t well enough.
And tbh PoE at launch had so little it was like 1/3th of D1. I have no idea how well received it was in general. I suppose it wasn’t bad received.
Probably because PoE was a fairly complete game when it released.
And yet, I still hear people say how they dont want to even try PoE today, because it was terrible when they tried it at release. Back when it had really bad graphics (more so than today), and combat was slow and the game lagged like crazy.
Same story with Wolcen. Plenty of people wont ever touch it, due to the disastrous launch, no matter how much they might improve the game.
The main issue I had with PoE is that it was exactly everything I expected and not one iota more. But it was solid enough that it stayed on my radar, unlike D3. Unless my brother buys the necromancer pack, I’m never buying RoS.
- Next day
- Next week
- Next month
Yeah I get it now.
I don’t have this one. I stopped playing after Season 5 due to D3 devs not caring at all for the fair competition of the game. I expect this will repeat with D4 since they already said competition won’t be global there. This doesn’t demotivate me to help them make a better game however. We have to evolve the aRPG genre so sooner or later everyone finds his place. Would it be D5 or an aRPG from another company for me, we’ll have to see. ARPGs can evolve both in pure RPG sense adopting AI, as well as in the competitive direction killing online solvers.
All I know is I heard that the Amazon WILL NOT HAVE ANY RANGE CAPABILITIES AT ALL, so basically it will be a female Barbarian with a spear. Really? Okaaaay. Yeah, that will be a MAJOR FAIL, but wtf do I know?
She would surely be able to throw this.
That’s called making sense and that’s not allowed.
It seems PoE crew are smart regarding this:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2982929
Yesterday, CD Projekt Red announced that Cyberpunk 2077 will now be released on December 10. We do not want to put our players in a position of having to choose between these two games, so we have decided to step out of the way and delay the release of Path of Exile 3.13 until January.
Will the D4 team be smart too and release the game before Cyberpunk Online comes… I hope so.
Yes, 2-4 weeks difference in release schedule is totally comparable to rushing out your game due to some silly online shooter coming out in 2022 or whatever.