I hadn't been planning to write anything on gaming for awhile after doing Gaming Week last week. But, events of the day have encouraged me to write one last blog entry.
I've spent a large portion of my evening on the Steam forums and the Castle Story Online forums. And there have been a few people saying some things that I don't necessarily agree with.
Now, before I get into that, I need to say one thing. I did hurl some minor insults at people, calling several people stupid and what not. For that, I am sorry. That is not something I should be doing, affiliated with the devs or not. I will endeavor to avoid doing that anymore in the future. I will stick to facts from here on in.
Alright, let's get into it. The first thing I've heard several people say is that $20 is too much for an early access game.
Well, this doesn't really hold up. The majority of games on Early Access are indeed $20. That's sort of par for the course. It's certainly worth $20, especially when you consider that it doesn't just get you the current version, but the completed version as well once it's done.
Second, back during the Kickstarter, the cheapest thing you could pledge for was beta, which was $15. Now, one of the running themes about kickstarting something is that you typically get something a bit cheaper, since you're supporting a project in it's infancy. If they turned around and offered this version for $15, wouldn't that be a bit of a slap in the face of the beta backers, who've been supporting the game since it's inception?
Another thing I'm hearing brought up a lot is that they were only asking for $80,000, to make a game worth $80,000. And that, even though they got $700,000, they should have still delivered the $80,000 game. This just doesn't make sense to me.
Personally, if I gave someone three-quarters of a million dollars, and they returned something to me that was only worth a tenth of that, I would be mad as hell. I would call them incompetent, I would call them thieves, and I'd scream from the mountaintop how crooked they were to just pocket all that extra money.
Would I like to have a complete version of the Castle Story they originally pitched for $80,000 now, polished and bug free? You bet your ass. But, I'd much rather have a much bigger, much better Castle Story later for $700,000.
There was actually an experiment done with children once. They gave them a marshmallow, and told them they could eat it right then, and it would be done, or they could wait 5 minutes, and get a second marshmallow. Many of the children just ended up eating the marshmallow, and then regretted it when they were told they couldn't have the second. And those that waited were much, much happier.
So come on guys, let Sauropod give us a second marshmallow, we paid for it after all.
Another thing I've heard said was this. Why didn't they just make the originally pitched game, and then build on that with all the extra money? Well, it's really just not that easy. For one, you never see 75% of a game. It's all in the background, it's the framework that holds it all together. All of that needs to be there and be right before you can really add on the stuff you do see.
This means that they couldn't have delivered the originally pitched game, and had the framework in place to build it into what they wanted, and done all of that for $80,000 or within the original time frame. It simply wouldn't have been feasible.
Furthermore, even if they had, you have the be a lot more careful with a fully released game. When something is in early access, bugs are expected. Patches that break things are expected as well. This can't be said for fully released games. If a studio patches a game that's been fully released for it's fully price and it breaks the game for half of the people that play it, that is really, really, really bad news.
I mean, look at EA, they've been doing that for ages. I still remember the debacle that was the 3rd patch for Battlefield 2142. It took them over a year to develop, and borked the game for half the players. And they even had a public alpha for this patch, which was just as broken. Oh, and that public alpha patch? It couldn't be turned into the fully patched version. When they released the full patch, they told everyone that they had to fully uninstall the game, reinstall it, reinstall the DLC, repatch all the previous patches, and then the new patch. It was a nightmare. And if it had been on a game that was an alpha itself, or Early Access, or whatever, I would have been alright with it. But, it wasn't. It was a full, released game that I had paid full price for. And I was pissed.
All of this is sort of a moot point anyway. Fact is, this is where it is. You can say what they should have done all day, but that doesn't change where things are now. They don't have a time machine, they can't go back and develop the 80k version of the game. They can only move forward, not backward. This is the version of the game we've got. It's good, and it works fairly well. And they're going to constantly be adding to it. Let them do it, and stop arguing about what they should have done. It's silly.
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