this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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The tag means that you will continue to develop it. The second you decide you are not developing it, the early access tag is a lie.
That said, the idea that it's OK to abandon a game you sold people to make another one is also disgusting and also makes you a piece of shit of a person. The disclaimer is not a free pass to be a trashbag. It does not excuse or justify throwing away customers. It is merely an acknowledgment that you might fail.
Frankly, not only should you be required to remove a game from early access before you're permitted to launch another, but that release should be validated by Valve, and sent back with a "nope, this isn't a product" to get to release. Until it's actually a full featured game, you shouldn't be allowed to do anything else. If your studio fails under those conditions, it deserves to fail. A studio "rescued" by shitting on customers to fleece new ones is a trash studio.
I fully believe that when a game stops being developed the Early Access tag should be removed but that's the extent of where I agree, anything past that is a problem strictly of the consumer who knowingly purchased a game that advertised itself as unfinished.
I would also agree that if you want to keep an early access tag at minimum you should be required to post developer updates using steams update log like many companies already do, and failure to do so will eventually result in your Early Access tag being replaced with an abandoned tag, that way it lets buyers know that the game is not a finished product and it's no longer in active development.
As for the sleaziness of abandoning a project once people have paid for it, I would chalk that down as they knew the risk upon buying the game since it was labeled Early Access. I think that it would be nice if the return window opened for 2 weeks when a game was abandoned to allow people who were hoping the project would go somewhere the ability to refund but I also think that neither company nor steam should be under obligation to do so since the consumer knew the risk going into it, plus I also think it would be kind of sleazy for those who got hours of playtime on it to expect that you'd get your full money's back, even if the project was discontinued
Early access is unconditionally not permission to abandon a game.
It is "permission" for your studio to fail. Literally nothing short of actual closure, forever, makes abandoning a game you sold forgivable.
Oh no, you have to drop the studio name that has no sales and spin up a new LLC.
It takes about ten minutes to do that