But to the point of this thread, my entire take on us coming up on the 2nd anniversary of BG3's EA is in the context of very strongly believing that Steam should have a hard policy of not allowing any game to be on EA for more than one year (maybe with some allowance for small indie devs).
I will have to strongly disagree with that. Games take years to develop - if you genuinely care about feedback from the player base it is in every company’s best interest to start this relationship as soon as possible. Would you really want for companies to progress further into the development before assessing what the player base likes and dislikes?
I am thinking to early access games I enjoyed and two years plus is not out of ordinary. Really, if you have less then a year of development left, what more can EA serve then pre-release cash flow and some player base to balance the final build?
Sure. We have very different ideas of how a studio should develop a game, so we're going to disagree on this. I personally don't place much stock in the supposed iterative process developers get from EA and consider EA games to simply be unfinished games being dumped on me, the player. As such I will never ever play an EA game. Which then means I won't ever be providing feedback to the developer through their EA process. And I don't think very highly of the "player" feedback devs get from people playing their unfinished games. Ergo my opposition to EA. Btw, I also believe the model and process by which games are crowdfunded is also broken, and not a good way for a developer to create a game. But unfortunately on that issue, small indie developers often have no choice but to go with crowdfunding.
