Early Access for games is a more modern invention, which did not exist in the past, it was once praised as a good and innovative thing, but now I think it has more drawbacks than it does good.
What does Early Access do? It grants users an early access to the game before it is finished, so they can get the game before it is actually finished and therefore help develop the game through testing and giving feedback.
Sounds all good at first? So let us break down what is bad with this model:
This is probably the "Pay to Win's" little brother. So what are cosmetics, it is the way of the game making money by selling cosmetic items for the game like hats for the player to wear. This is different to "Pay to Win" in the sense that someone who purchases it, does not gain an advantage in the game, so sounds good at first, but at second thought, then why does it work anyway? I mean if cosmetics supposedly don't do anything for you in the game, then why people buy them?
This is probably the worst design choice you can ever make in video game design history. I should have covered this earlier, because of how severe this problem is and hardly anyone really understands the real problems with it, but whatever lets get to the point why "Pay to Win" is so bad.
This is a new kind of series of blog posts and it is about bad game design choices that are used very commonly and hardly anyone pointing them out. I don't want to go nitpicking about minor design flaws, but about things that have the potential to ruin a whole game, yes not just parts of the game, but absolutely everything.
After writing the recent blog post "The dumbing down of games" I started asking myself the question: Is it the dumbed down games that create dumbed down gamers or is it dumbed down gamers that require dumbed down games?
It most likely is a combination of both, the question is more what is the bigger factor or the root cause.
This is a topic I wonder why not many people already talk about this, it is the dumbing down of games.
It is probably because most gamers today are young and they don't know how it was in the past and for the older people maybe because their memory is not working anymore. However let me tell you how it was in the past and go through each step you needed or did go through in order to play a computer game:
One issue leads to the next and the potato farmers kind of arise out of the denial of technological progress in the open source gaming community. Most often those are open source game developers or advocates and probably out of their denial of technological progress they use the argument "But it runs on old hardware" to justify, why they never improve or care to improve.
This is kind of a part two of the open source gaming community in denial. There are so many aspects to this problem, that I probably need multiple articles about it. The last blog post covered the problem that the open source gaming community is in denial of them failing in terms of market share and this one is more about how they do not even understand the concept of improving in technological progress, like most of the rest of the world does. You understand?
As an open source game developer I needed to search for methods to market my game and since the mainstream market is not my main target group I needed to search for alternative ways for marketing. So I searched what open source gaming communities there are and also what Linux gaming communities there are, but there were not that many active ones and the "active" ones I found basically all live in denial and therefore are as good as inactive.
This is a follow up to the follow up of the last posts. I thought more about the whole thing with the modern internet, social media and how algorithms now decide what people get to see, even what they like and what they consume and came to the conclusion that this all may be a huge contributor to the insanity of humanity.
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