@Robrecht Good communication is essential. But it was also very well communicated that Wasteland 2 is still very much in beta state and the Steam early access version is not the final product. You can only do so much with good communication. The internet is a wild place in which happen weird, unexpected and just plain silly things. Just look at all the comments and dumb user reviews about DayZ....
I also add here what I wrote on Swen's blog:
As an alternative:
Why not opening up Divinity Original Sin for preorder on Steam and giving every person preordering the game access to the beta version?
Usually people are more forgiving when playing a beta named beta than playing an early access game. It's really just a wording thing but words can be important when it comes to expectations and treatment of games and stuff.
And don't forget that 3 of the 4 pros can even be achieved with a free beta and even more so because people are much more forgiving when playing something for free. A free beta is seen differently as a paid early access version. A free beta is seen as a community service and an effort to make the game better while paid early access is often seen as a cheap way of getting revenue for an unfinished product.....
But of course that would probably cause some problems with the kickstarter userbase. Maybe you could give people paid access to the alpha and early beta and release a free and more polished beta later, just 2 or 3 weeks before release or so (maybe raffling 10k beta-keys or something).
And when doing a Steam Early Access approach, the price point is extremly important: many people fail to understand that some ealry access games have a higher price than the final release product in order to bring the pricing on the same level as corresponding kickstarter tiers. You guys have the benefit that every backer gets the beta version so you could reasonably price your early access version which means that it could be on the same level as the release price or even below that. That's a very big pro compared to Wasteland 2 which is priced 60$ in early access (or Planetary Annihilation which is priced 80$....)
