Paying for Unfinished Games

Don't do it.

Sixty Dollars. No demo.

I have a really cool game for you. It’s an open-world game where you play as a space pilot, and you can fly across planets, out into space and anywhere you want to. It has really detailed ships that react in real time to damage, you can customize them and you can even build and pilot giant frigates the size of a small island. The game also simulates fluids in real time, so you can physically pour yourself a pint of beer in-game before drunk driving your spaceship. It’s called Space Drink X-treme: 2000.

Sounds like a radical game, right? Wanna try it out? Well, for the low low price of $60, you can get your hands on this wonderful game… eventually. At some point. I don’t have a working prototype, I haven’t made a game before, and I can barely write an if statement, but I did download Blender and I made a rad little ship with it. That’s worth $60, right?

All my effort went into making this not look like a penis.

What? You’re saying you’d pay sixty dollars if I could come up with a working prototype? How can I get a working prototype if I can’t make any money? I need it for development, which, by the way, after running the calculations, accounting for expenses, salaries and hiring Danny Elfman to make all the music, the game’s budget is around 30 million dollars. Hey, Elfman isn’t cheap. He did the Simpsons theme.

Today we’re talking about paying for games before they’re done. Early access, kickstarter, and even live service games.

Kickstarter

If you want to make a game you need money, but to get money, you need to sell a product. That’s a catch-22 if I ever heard one. The most popular to get money without selling something useful is to go into insurance. The second way is to ask others for money, also known as panhandling. Wait, that’s a horrible way to put it. It’s not panhandling, it’s investment. That’s a much nicer word.

Except you’re not investing in anything when you donate to a kickstarter. You might get the game, if it ever releases, and some bonus trinkets, but nothing else, but that’s what you’re paying for, right? If you donate $60 to Space Drink X-treme: 2000, you expect to get a copy of the game, but an investment is different. When you invest, you get some money back based on how well the product performs. You have a financial stake in the product, but that’s stupid, right? Expecting to get some money just because you donated to a kickstarter, but that’s how investment works and why people give other people money for unfinished products.

Investing usually costs a lot more, so it’s okay to not expect anything other than the product for something as low as thirty dollars. With that contribution, you and several hundred other people are saying “Yes, there is a market for this product, and we want it”. Which is great, it’s about as close as you can get to the literal interpretation of the phrase “voting with your wallet”. The only way you could make your money vote any harder is if you were lobbying for Israel in congress.

Backing a game on kickstarter, or more accurately, pre-ordering a game on it, comes with risks. The game not meeting its funding goal is a bad ending but an acceptable one. If this happens, you don’t get charged. The second worst case scenario is that you buy the game, it actually releases, and it sucks. It’s not what was promised, lacks content or it’s just straight up doo-doo. These are the dangers of buying games sight-unseen based on flimsy promotional material made specifically to sell you dreams.

There was a platform made specifically to crowdfund and invest in games. It was called Fig, and it no longer exists. There were a total of 21 projects on the platform, with four of them being massive failures, including the ill-fated Intellivision Amico console, which is still “in development”. Its most famous game was Psychonauts 2, which actually released, and Outer Wilds, which I swear I’ll play at some point. The platform had a vetting process where a board of industry veterans like noted sock-puppeteer Tim Schafer and Feargus Urquhart, of Obsidian entertainment.

The platform allowed for returns on investment, but only for investments of $1,000 or more. The company was absorbed into another firm and doesn’t exist, with its website in a cryogenically frozen state, telling everyone about the wonderful new opportunities they won’t get to benefit from.

Randy Pitchford and Cliff Bleszinski joined Fig after some time, too. I’m not insinuating that Fig’s failure was due to their involvement, because I think that would count as libel, but I’m going to put those unrelated clauses together for comedic effect. I wonder if any of the meetings involved Randy Pitchford showing others his USB drive full of “magic tricks”.

Any chance to take a jab at cliff blezinski is a good one

I’ve never donated to a kickstarter, and I don’t think I ever will. Paying someone for the idea of a game or a product doesn’t sound like a good way to spend my ever-diminishing resources. Sure, there have been successful kickstarters, but if their goal is to make a product and sell it, I’ll buy it when it’s out on the market. As one usually does.

What if you have a product, but it’s not exactly there yet?

Early Access

Remember those demo discs that used to come with some game magazines back in the day? You don’t? Oh you weren’t born in the Cretaceous period? Very funny. What if you could take those free demos, and make people pay for them? That’s Early Access.

To be fair, for a game to be in Early Access, it has to be somewhat functional. It can be a glorified tech demo, but it has to have some gameplay. It could take years to finish, or it could be abandoned halfway through development, but at least you have something clogging up your Steam library, which is more than you can say for most kickstarters.

The goal of an Early Access game is to get money. They show you the game and you can buy it to play it before it’s done because you just can’t wait to get your hands on it. It’s like going into a restaurant, ordering a meal and then going back into the kitchen to snack on the ingredients while you wait.

Games in Early Access are in a playable state. Some might even be perfectly functional, just missing a few levels or features. A lot of games go into early access for years. Baldur’s Gate 3 spent three years in Early Access, and it became a huge hit. Same with Slay the Spire (which I covered here), spent two years in Early Access before releasing.

Some games have a relatively finished product, explode in popularity and then get abandoned. This is the case with BattleBit Remastered. It started its beta excursion back in 2023, where it sold hundreds of thousands of copies and became the game of the summer. It was hailed as the Battlefield killer, delivering an actual massive combat experience to fill the hole left by Battlefield 2049’s disastrous launch. At one point it had over 86,000 concurrent players on Steam. Not bad for a game made by five people. Then, one day, the updates stopped coming in, the developers stopped communicating and the game just died.

The game was fun while it lasted, at least.

Serves you right for buying Early Access, am I right? Imagine buying a game before it’s even out yet. Thing is, the game was pretty much done. It was a functioning product, with online play and a lot of features. It was more complete and it worked better than Battlefield 2049 at launch.

As a model for fundraising, I prefer this one. I’ve bought some games that were in EA, and they’ve been great. I get to play them as they evolve, and I usually get a completed experience after some time. Excellent games like Oxygen Not Included or Turbo Overkill.

“Sure that might sound nice”, you say, “but imagine paying for a game like BattleBit then having it completely die while it’s still being worked on. What a waste of time and money!”

Now I inconspicuously segue into…

Live Service Games

Backing a game on kickstarter is like buying the idea of a burger, getting one in Early Access is like snacking on its ingredients and a live service game is like going into a burger place you used to frequent, only to find out it’s a terrible sushi restaurant now, but it’s still called “Burgertopia” and its logo is a massive hamburger.

I’ve had a lot of experience with live service games, and have come to the realization that they’re an even bigger scam than Early Access games. In fact, you could say that live service games are in a perpetual state of early access. You’re beta-testing a product that’s ethereal; it can stop existing at any point either through a Ship of Theseus style re-imagining or because someone pulled the plug on it.

The plug-pull is an easy one to explain. The game just shuts down. End of Service. The game is too old, or not profitable enough, or maybe someone wants a tax write-off, so they go up to the server and unplug it. You can’t play it anymore. If you spent money on it, it’s gone. It’s still in your library, technically, but you can’t do anything with it. Go try to play Hawken, or Rise of the Incarnates. You don’t even know what those are? That’s my point.

The Ship of Theseus one takes a bit of explaining. It’s a thought experiment; the hero Theseus has a ship. After every battle, he replaces one piece of it. If the deck gets damaged, he replaces the deck. The sails are torn, he replaces the sail. After he’s replaced every single part of his ship, is it still his ship? Sure, it’s his ship, but it’s not the same ship he started with. If you were to take all the damaged parts he discarded, and put them together into another ship, which would be his real ship?

The same happens to live service games all the time. I used to be an avid League of Legends player from around 2010 to 2013. I hope God can forgive me for this, and I hope you don’t think lesser of me for it, but I changed my ways. I used to love the game, and I have come back to play it over the years due to external pressure, but the game is not the same. Sure it’s the same game. It’s still a moba, three lanes, an excessive amount of characters and people so toxic they can’t leave their house without alerting the EPA, but it’s different.

Over the years it has received hundreds if not thousands of patches. Some tiny, some massive. A quick little adjustment here, a number change there. Maybe this character does a little bit more damage with one of his spells, maybe this other champion was nerfed. Maybe that other champion was nerfed. Everything has been nerfed. Constantly.

Then there are massive changes. Karma, a champion I used to play, was completely redesigned. Her kit is different. She has the same name, and looks similar, but her function is completely different. Same with Urgot and Sion. One day, they’re your favorite champion, and suddenly the next they get “improved” and it’s no longer what you liked.

Then there are changes to the map, additional mechanics, graphical updates. After so many incremental changes, it’s a different game. If you stop playing it for a few years, it becomes practically unrecognizable. The name’s the same. The people are the same. It looks and plays similar, but it’s not the game I played back in 2012. Same thing with DotA2. The game I play today isn’t the one I started playing back in 2013, and there’s no way to go back to it.

To me, the tale of BattleBit Remastered’s failure isn’t a cautionary tale against Early Access, it’s a stark reminder that a lot of games nowadays are glorified rentals. The plug could be pulled at any moment, or it could morph into something you don’t like. Just like with kickstarter, you’re paying for something that might not come out how you want it to, but it gives you the same feeling Early Access does of owning something.

Conclusion

This was mostly to get my thoughts out on playing unfinished games since there are a lot of them out there and I’ve been playing some. As with most games I play, with the intention of reviewing them, but how do you review these kinds of games? I mentioned it in my review for Helldivers 2 and in my first-impressions of 2XKO, but these kinds of games are subject to change on a whim. There’s always someone in some office poking and prodding at it, changing things here and there. For balance, they say, to make the game more interesting, to add more content (which they will charge you more for), but really a lot of it is jut because.

I played 9 Kings, which is in early access, and The Bazaar. They’re both roguelite deckbuilders, but one is in beta and the other is already out, fully released. The one in beta has had less drastic changes than the one in its 1.0 build. In fact, the changes have been so frequent and game-changing, that a lot of guides from one month ago are completely invalid. Every patch brings with it a slew of changes, and anything you say about the game might not apply the next day. It’s madness.

I understand if a game like Deadlock, which is technically in alpha, makes grand, sweeping changes, since it’s still technically in alpha, but these other games take it too far.

The moral of the story is, use your money wisely. If you want to back something on kickstarter, go ahead. I strongly advise against it, but you can do what you want. You’re an adult. I hope.

You can trust Space Drinker X-treme: 2000. That’s a quality game. You can tell by the sixty million dollar budget. Yeah, the budget increased a little since last time. I want a Bugatti Mistral- I mean- the game needs a Bugatti Mistral. It’s very important for the plot. If you pay me, I’ll deliver a semi-playable product in approximately seven years. Maybe.

Expect reviews for upcoming card games in the future, even if the information in them will be outdated a few hours after posting.