In regards to my post above - I feel a bit embarrassed and silly right now, as the Steam store page does in fact state that the game is in Alpha. The writing is even in bold, but I somehow missed that - lesson learned, don't post when tired lolz.
However I still feel that my 2nd point is still valid - too many companies in recent history have done beta's & open access events which have been marketing moves, and sadly have distorted many people's expectations of what an alpha/beta or early access is.
Terraria is a game that still technically in alpha.
Terraria was released quite long ago.
Not by the definition of alpha release. The game was reissued several times with new updates that would not work with old save games. There was never a 'feature complete' version of the game to work with. Nor was there ever a 'gold' release of the game either.
The game was released with the idea of incremental and small updates to bring new features. This is also the case for most new digital only distributed games. But instead of incremental feature enhancement, the game itself pretty much changed with every update.
To call it a beta, would be a bad term. Indefinite alpha is better to call it. The same idea is with starbound. While the game is in 'beta', the entire mechanics of the game are being changed constantly, which means that it's not feature complete, and thus not really a beta candidate, and should really be called an alpha release.
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