Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Please don't do Steam Early Access with D:OS

Companies like Larian need to care and consider these type's of people and the impact they have - I'm not talking about ppl trolling, I'm talking about people buying the game with no real understanding of what SEA is or what a Alpha/Beta is, being disappointed/upset/angry/etc at the game... then raging on the forums, their twitter account, facebook, etc.

The issue is your not just getting 1 disgruntled customer - your also getting a bad name / reputation with whoever that person has access to... be it real life friends, ppl who follow them on twitter, ppl who read their facebook post's, etc.

Yes, you can never bypass / remove / avoid that situation... you will always get these kind of dumbwits. However, as a business.. companies like Larian really do need to consider these things. The more negative backlash that happens, the worse the games rep will get... and the less money they will make as fewer ppl will buy the game (and yes, you do get ppl who do avoid games that had an early on bad rep).

And with an every increasing backlash against Steam Early Access, as well as backlash against full retail prices SEA games... going this route is risky. Yes Larian will get some more income as people buy the game, however they also get lumbered with all the bad press, feelings & reputation full-prices SEA games are getting right now. Will the extra income they get now from going SEA outway what they will loose from ppl who will now avoid the game no matter what?

They obviously feel they will (else they would not have gone the SEA route), but I worry that they won't. I also worry that this decision will not only adversely effect D:OS, but any game that they make in the future.

Heck, there's already a negative review for D:OS that speaks clearly that the person does not understand what an alpha/beta SEA game is. Complaining about things like loot balancing, control issues, etc.. these are things that can be resolved before the game goes live. But now the game is permanently going to have that negative review stating the person felt they wasted their money.

And the Steam Discussion forum for this game is already pointless and a waste unless it gets moderated soon, and all it will do is help drive people away from the game if they check it out - lots of threads complaining about the price, threads about Larian not being "Inde", threads complaining about performance (oh noes! an alpha hasn't been optimized!),m etc and so on.

Around 50% of the top 30 user made threads are pointless, stupid price/quality/SEA trolling threads. Hopefully long term this won't tarnish Larian or the games future. But who knows.

There's, like, 50 times more posts complaining than bug reports on Steam forums.

Jesus.

Hi guys,

So, I was scrolling a little bit through the Steam forums and one thing which seems important to me is the following:

Somewhere on the steam page there should be a statement about the price of the full game release.

Most people are complaining that they are paying more for the early access than for the finished game and/or the same amount as for the finished product.

So, I guess, DOS won't be less than $ 40 on release (kickstarter copies were 28$ and there is not much in between). So, Larian, please, add the estimated full price of the game to the steam page. (If I were you, I would set the full price to more than 40$ just to stop those from whining that they have to pay full price for an unfinished product).

Would that really work? Great logic if so

Well, actually not sure whether this will work^^. However, there are a few posts on Steam bashing "full price for an unfinished product" thing. So, setting the price for full release a little bit higher than the alpha access would take from them one reason to complain. But, alas, I guess, the trolls will find another food soon enough...

Won't help. Wasteland 2 has a big "About the price" sticky and whining's still rampant.

Early access is turning out pretty the way we expected based on other early access games...

I remember when releasing a game in a bad state was frowned upon, as they would have been considered "unfinished". Then day-one patches were frowned upon, because it still looked like the games were unfinished. And now you officially pay full price for an unfinished game and it seems to be okay, because it's labeled "Early Access". That's a really smart move. In the future there will be only "Early Access" games and then after some patches the "full game" will be done, at which point no more updates will be released. Developers may be on the secure side now, but it's sad that players seem to be embracing this practice.

Even when day one patches were frowned upon, it didn't mean such patches were never needed.

You get more out of early access than you do with a pre-order. If you are not interested enough in a game to pre-order, or are not confident in a company's ability to deliver a quality product in a reasonable timeframe, then don't buy anything on early access.

A friend of mine told me about the DOS kickstarter and I checked into it but didn't invest, due to complications with how one needs to pay to invest (not that I didn't have the money, I did).

So, had it not been for Steam's Early Access I would not have even remembered that Larian were even putting out this game.

So, I for one am quite pleased that they chose to put it up on EA and bought it as soon as I saw it there today.

As far as all those complaints about pricing, it happens in every EA titles forum on Steam and the way that I look at it, is that it's simply filled with people that don't understand or believe that the "Minecraft" early access system is the only one that should ever be used. It's not, and it shouldn't be.

Congrats to Larian on getting in on Steam EA, I hope it really brings in a nice chunk of change for you that you can use to make the game even better.

I believe that Steams EA policies will change in time, the more developers that do not finish their games in a timely manner, the more likely it is that people will not buy into the whole EA system on Steam and they'll have to change their policies about what games are allowed as well as possibly change how/whether people can get refunds from those games that did not finish up at all or within a certain amount of time that the developer will need to state in their EA agreement with Steam.

But that won't happen unless / until people stop buying EA games and that will just take a bit of time for people to see that many developers will never finish the games they put up for EA. I know of one game that said they were done, but the popular concencus amongst it's consumers was that it was nowhere near finished and that the devs only called it finished so they could get out of doing anymore work on it and move on to something else to make more money as the money given to them for their original work had run dry and they needed more money but the game was no longer selling well since they called it finished when it was clearly not.

A note on pricing. I can see the arguments and will not present my view but will present how others have handled pricing:

a) Kickstart games with committed price structure (those who have done kickstart believe that they cannot undersell the prices kickstart people played until the game has been released):
examples: planetary something or other charged a certain amount for game only/alpha/beta and therefore charged the same amount when they made EA available:

b) kickstart game with significantly delay adjusted policy but held pricing (and policy change) across the line with adjustment:
for example grim-dawn charged for alpha/beta but due to significant delays after allowing people with alpha and later beta to play several months released the game to all backers and for steam they released the game as EA with current selling price (which is higher than when on kickstart but lower than prices they were selling for alpha/beta).

c) straight EA games - some offer prices at a release price but many offer at discount (blackguards, M&M X, starbound (no clue if this is release price or regular price) kerbal space (slowing raising prices as they approach release), gemni 2, ...)
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I guess I will make a comment; perhaps D:OS should throw in an old game like DD or BD as a bonus for those who buy early (this is what M&M X did with M&M 6).
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Anyway it is much easier for non kickstart games to do EA than kickstart games because they are not beholden to a given price structure but quite frankly the whiners are just that whiners. They simply do not have to buy the game. Most of the time whining is about trying to get something (it is a form of negotiation after all - if I complain maybe they will toss me a bone) conversely there is something to be said about 'paying' testers so tossing a small bone isn't always a bad idea.
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Having said all of this none of it is relevant to myself (I have a kickstart copy) and quite frankly I'm getting really tired of the whine crowd. Posting a suggestion in a constructive fashion can be quite useful but frequently that is not the case on the steam board. No clue why the blackguard EA has gone so smoothly - probably because the devs jumped in there right away with honest answers and they have done frequently updates.

Swen tweeted the following video from TotalBiscuit regarding Early Access: https://twitter.com/LarAtLarian/status/424678510398279680

It's a very good video explaining why Early Access at this stage is a very flawed system. People should be urged NOT to buy an early access game except you are a really enthousiastic to the game. I agree completely.

@meme: the reason by Blackguards is considered as one of the solely successful and good early access games is because Blackguards' game is separated in chapters. Every chapter that gets released to early access is a nearly a complete product. It's not an alpha, nearly not a beta: every chapter you get is a complete finished product.

Personally, I think it's more commonsensical than intelligent. That said, I can agree with many points TB came up with since, at heart, it's a matter of communication and I don't think the current Steam EA directs the players to what they want by providing them with appropriate info. As a backer, I was filled with enough info about this project. Immediately after installing the game, I found it was not in the state which allows me to do my usual save/reload heavy gameplay (I cannot refrain myself from experimenting). Simply, I remembered the comment by Swen about corrupted saves and uninstalled the game and left feedback to other people.-Not a big deal most likely because I had been well-informed.

That said, currently, Steam user reviews seem to be quite favorable with little more than a few negative comments compared with something around fifty positive comments. The state of Steam boards are kind of "normal" or what they are usually like.

All these people reffering 'EA' is so confusing. Please type out early access. Oh the humanity!

In this particular thread with the title? I did put Steam before EA for sure, though.

Some good stuff in that TotalBiscuit commentary except I would have thought that 'buyer beware' would have applied more to early access, not less.

Caveat emptor vs Paternalism?

Yet he ends up concluding that ultimately the power resides with us anyway and exhorts us to be more discerning (better) consumers.

It really does sound like consumer behaviour is the main problem here, especially its apparent lack of ability to effectively regulate the industry. But do we really want or need government to step in here? Rather, improving consumer engagement with early access seems to be where it's at; making it more consumer-friendly and educating consumers to make more informed choices. I notice TB didn't call for the abolish of SEA, but rather for more responsibility from all parties involved (developers, valve, the media & consumers) and ways to improve its use. I though he made some good criticisms of valve/steam in that regard to make SEA more consumer friendly, they definitely need to lift their game and we should demand that they do so.

In the video, at glance, the responsibility may appear to have shifted from all parties to users, which, however, is, I think, partially because TB has his concerns about the unigonrable influence of consumer votes: if you buy something, you are voting for the market and partially because the majority of his audiences are gamers/users. That said, to my ears, basically, he sounds to think all the parties are responsible: Steam needs to direct their users useful information rather than just trying to avoid their responsibility, the devs should write the info with human language rather than mass of technical jargon, mass media shouldn't treat SEA games as if they were final products (since they are obviously not). He definitely doesn't sound to think the problem lies in Early Access itself, so, I took it the main issue is communication among the parties involved.

I just wanted to add that people highlighting the negative aspects of early access are contributing really valuable things to this dialogue. While I think that some of the issues surrounding SEA can be a bit exaggerated, I'm really glad that people are agitating for change and consumer empowerment. I especialy liked Kamatsu's 'devil's advocate' post in the worst thread.

To be honest, I don't think Swen's blog really did justice to the nuance of Kamatsu's view and OP, after all it was written with the developer's perspective primarily in mind. A pros and cons from the consumer's pov would look very different, with a weightier cons. For example, I get the impression that valve isn't making much of an effort to make things especially clear and obvious for their SEA customers because it would harm their profits to do so.

With all of these perspectives we can approach something resembling the whole picture.

"With all of these perspectives we can approach something resembling the whole picture.", about which, I couldn't agree more. Also, I agree that SEA has many things which can be improved. That said, probably the best place for suggestions is the Steam site. Here, we have only users and developers, which would make it more beneficial to report bugs/point out misleading info which are under the control of the developers.

And yeah...unfortunately, that thread started in a wrong way, IMHO-The OP seems to be unhappy with the obvious fact that the game has TB combat, which is clearly written as one of the key features, and left after he/she finished the single post just like some examples we can see in Steam forums.

Regardless of the OP the discussion was about EA anyway. And all the negative consequences, mentioned here, started to appear after 2 days since "release".

I'm curious - how have sales been for Divinity EA ?