Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

And in other news regarding how Sony is going to squander their lead:

Sony having 'massive conversations' about an Early Access program - Destructoid

Early Access, along with Greenlight, is the trendy little shitstain that is bringing down the reputation Steam worked to build. You can barely trust the majority of indies with it. Everyone is hoping their game is the next Minecraft or a game PewDiePie will sensationalize and its a system that has been horribly exploited by incomplete, broken crap. Most of it never deserved to ask for money to start with.

[Icemage]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

I "get" the point of Early Access (get funding to complete a project under development + get feedback), but agree the current incarnation is just awful. Steam's version of early access is basically a dressed up version of Capcom's original proposed Mega Man Legends 3 "paid demo".

Yuck. No thanks.


Icemage

[Malacite]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

^ yeah I'm getting sick of that crap, it's what kept me from trying out Rust.

[Firewind]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

I used to be a huge proponent of "Alpha is Alpha" and "Beta is Beta". To be honest I still am. The issue is is when people start charging for it, then getting all defensive when I start to treat it like a full release. "Oh give it time!" "OooOoh but Eeaarly acesssss! meeeeeeeh!"

No. Fuck off. As soon as you start charging me for a full game, I consider that your released state. No exceptions. If you are starting to charge me money for the privilege of QAing your shit, I will start to treat it with the contempt that it deserves. Caveat Emptor doesn't even apply here, Valve are the most anti consumer corporation in the Games industry at the moment because they have nothing but contempt for consumer rights. They knowingly and willingly sell and market unfinished products as finished products and laugh at the Gamer all the way to the fucking bank. Even EA, fucking EA will give you a refund if you are not satisfied with a game on Origin. EA!

You wouldn't but a house without a roof and say "Oh well! It will be fine soon because my house is still in fucking early access!". That is what Valve is doing, they are treating us all as like stupid little children that don't know any better, and are showing nothing but contempt for consumer rights, and the laws of many nations that protect those.

Now Sony wants to rush into the Early Access Gold Rush...Fuck's sake...

[Malacite]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

Yeah I'm not a fan of this development at all.

Ugh and you were doing so well Sony... and of course it's not going to go away, because no matter how much we don't like it there's plenty of morons who will just gobble it up anyway.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

Excuse me while I laugh maniacally at the lack of self-awareness there.

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

Is "early access" really that bad?

As far as I can tell, it shifts the capital risk from the investors to the customers. ( One can label it "early access", or some form of "crowd sourcing", but the risk shifting remains the same.)

I guess the customers can cry foul, but if a project is wanted by customers, but no investors can be found, it's either the gamer-consumers take on at least some of the risk, or it doesn't get made.

Of course, individuals can always decide not to buy into this--which makes it fair, IMO. After all, if you didn't pay for a product that was never delivered, you didn't lose anything.

* * *

Personally, I don't find "early access" games very attractive since I have an aversion to risks. I just don't understand why several people get so upset at a mere proposal of such. (The article indicates Sony hasn't even decided on exactly how to proceed, if I didn't misread it.)

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

I just don't understand why several people get so upset at a mere proposal of such.

Maybe because any decent idea that happens in this industry gets perverted and ruined when it falls into the hands of major publishers?

Let's just look at Dark Souls, for example. Great implementation of online play, but not fully requisite to the experience and if you don't want to get involved in PVP, you don't really have to - you can just disconnect with no penalty save for the option of online co-op. Watch_Dogs, however, wants to shame you for playing a single player game by yourself. You are placed in online rankings for that game whether you asked or not and if you opt out of player invasions, your ranking is reset to default.

If Dark Souls servers go down, no problem, your game still works and you can forge ahead - just without online features. Watch Dog's U Play servers go down and HAHA, fuck you, we're UbiSoft so you can't play your single player game at all now.

So gee, I can't imagine why people are immensely skeptical about big third parties going into early access.

Additionally, this model has killed some indie studios already due to the demo effect, which more or less proves people who get in early with the games might lose interest on full release and not tell anyone about it. Word of mouth is critical with indies and if that dies, you early access game may die with it.

[Firewind]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

It's not just that too, games will potentially be in Alpha or Beta for a LONG time, and it is very easy to become burnt out on a game. Day Z is a good example of this. It is a great game that is losing a ton of hype because people have played it enough and are ready to move on. When it is out, well why play it when you have aready sunk hundreds of hours into it?

It isn't just that, with Early Access and Kickstarter, you are basically selling the game early on at a potential loss for less than full price. Why is that a problem? Each early access purchase is functionally a lost sale at release. Nobody is going to buy a game they already own at full price, they just don't do it. So how else do you make your development, marketing and publishing costs back? Especially with Kickstarter where you may well be throwing in extra merchandise that you could have sold separately. Both of these things have killed devs jumping on this Gold Rush bandwagon. Totalbiscuit did do a great video on Kickstarter and the dangers of jumping on that bandwagon but his videos are apparently as welcome as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip on these forums.

Then there are the PewDieBait games, where people put out a game intentionally aimed at people like PewDiePie or The Yogscast that are put out incomplete and full of bugs because those guys are basically guaranteed a million views for each video. Look no further than shit like Goat Simulator. Not knocking PewDiePie orYogscast here I actually quite like a few of their videos, but it's clear that you have a new stream of Youtube Bait games coming out.

So let's list the Early Access games worth playing:

Starbound
Prison Architect
Day Z

Lets list the Early Access games that are now "complete" that are worth playing:

Divinity: Original Sin

Yeah, four games. Four very good games, but fucking four games. Four. That is what early access is bringing us, and we aren't even getting in to the games like Towns that the devs just abandon for other projects.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

Maybe because any decent idea that happens in this industry gets perverted and ruined when it falls into the hands of major publishers?

I'd argue this one was ruined upon arrival. Paying to QA test an incomplete product is bullshit, to say nothing of all the other pitfalls of the Early Access model.

As with episodic games, my stance will continue to be "Oh you're making a game? Great, I'll play it once it's actually finished."

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

I think it really boils down to the type of game we're talking about here. Minecraft proves the Paid Alpha/Beta/Early access thing can work. These are games where tons and tons of things could go wrong and letting people in to play early can be an asset there. Similarly, the classic point-and-click adventure just fits an episodic model perfectly. It doesn't work well much elsewhere, The Walking Dead's success shows us there is a way to do it.

Big AAA publishers don't get that, though. They just see a success and want that money.

Expansion pack DLC used to be something that added at least ten or twenty more hours of life to a game, if not more, but then it became "add-on" or pre-order DLC and it all went to shit. Very few people don't exploit that model and its unfortunate that people knee-jerk when there are studios that release and price DLC in a reasonable fashion. People don't care, though, because they just see EA, Ubisoft and others abuse and milk the model for every last penny. It makes me feel bad for Arkane Studios or Bethesda when they take extra time to work on genuinely substantial content.

[Malacite]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

If Dark Souls servers go down, no problem, your game still works and you can forge ahead - just without online features. Watch Dog's U Play servers go down and HAHA, fuck you, we're UbiSoft so you can't play your single player game at all now.

Yeah that honestly pissed me off to no end about HoMM 6 especially since their servers were frequently going down (nevermind that the game was complete utter trash compared to 5 with far too many drastic, awful changes)


I can tolerate it with Diablo 3 since well, Diablo 2 was a huge MP oriented experience anyway and that's what I wanted with 3. It's still annoying, but not deal-breaking - most of Blizzard's stuff is hugely centered around MP for that matter so it's not totally unexpected I guess.

But can you imagine if Nintendo tried pulling that crap with say a Zelda game? Or SE with a (non-MMO) FF game?


Way off topic but yeah, I have to agree that we should be cautiously optimistic at best with some of this stuff.

[Firewind]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

Actually hardly anyone played Diablo 2 via Battlenet. The vast majority of multiplayer games were played via LAN. Same with Starcraft and Warcraft. Most games of DOTA were played over LAN and really weren't played over battlenet. The main reason was well, you couldn't. Have you ever tried playing a game like that over dialup?

Anyway, why should a single plater experience be tied to servers being up? Diablo 3 is worse because the games are hosted on the servers. Have you ever tried playing D3 single player? f you get a bad connection to the server, good luck played through that latency.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

Anyway, why should a single plater experience be tied to servers being up?

I'm assuming data collection. I seem to recall games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect at least allowing you to disable it/opt out, but then, EA still helped create the "services" for those games that UbiSoft as iterated on with Uplay.

I see some logic behind it, but only when used to improve the game, DA2 shows us they can use it as an excuse to make budget cuts and rush a game. Bioware was given no time to make the kind of game DA:O was (despite Gaider's claims to the contrary) and so team members pointed at the data indicating that players used other races less than humans to justify Hawke, among other things. Inquisition tells us a different story, though - one where they had enough time to create, implement and write up to four races for the role of the Inquisitor.

And have better combat, exploration and tactics. Their post-E3 videos prove it got the time it needed. They basically looked at Skyrim, then looked at the backlash DA2 got and asked EA if they could at least get a couple more years to make the game they really wanted.

[Malacite]

Re: Sony Basically gives up on First Party support for the Vita

Actually hardly anyone played Diablo 2 via Battlenet. The vast majority of multiplayer games were played via LAN. Same with Starcraft and Warcraft. Most games of DOTA were played over LAN and really weren't played over battlenet. The main reason was well, you couldn't. Have you ever tried playing a game like that over dialup?

Anyway, why should a single plater experience be tied to servers being up? Diablo 3 is worse because the games are hosted on the servers. Have you ever tried playing D3 single player? f you get a bad connection to the server, good luck played through that latency.

Proof? I remember back in high school seeing a lot of people online for D2, BW and WC3. Blizzard's also said themselves they had quite a lot of people on at the time.

I'm not disagreeing with the single player argument at all, it's annoying, but you also have to consider 1 major difference between D2 and D3.


With D2, if you made an offliine character, you could only use them offline unless you used open battlenet which was just begging to be hit with all kinds of viruses and other nonsense - f that. With D3 all your character data is stored server-side like an MMO, so you can play single or multiplayer with the same characters from any PC. Being a hardcore player latency issues do piss me off tremendously as I've lost a number of characters to lag but for better or worse this seems to be where Blizzard is going with their games now.