Spacebase DF-9

Another high profile early access failure.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/246090/discussions/0/613936673398320149/

 

and another game dies because the dev couldn't pull it off. And....

 

I haven't looked into it, but it sounds like despite being in "alpha" they were still adding major features ("depth"). Is that normal for Early Access games? What ever happened to alpha being the part where you start bug-fixing and tweaking an otherwise feature-complete piece of software?

All I know is what's in that quote in the OP, but it smells like scope creep and/or an unplanned project with no finishing line to me.

Edit: Woah, that's a Double Fine game?

 

The developer was double fine - and one of the quotes they used earlier: "Double Fine is not a random fly-by-night indie dev and we are not going to silently pull the plug on Spacebase or any other in-development project. Doing so would be disastrous for our reputation and it would kill us emotionally "

They pretty much slagged of us small indies with that quotesbut i doubt any of us small time guys would abandon the project because we can work on a project for no pay unlike them.

 

You might be thinking of beta. I've always felt an alpha was a potentially unstable product that is gaining new features.

 

Pretty surprised. The game looked quite good from the trailer.

It was trying to do a lot though ...

 

They are not silently pulling the plug. They are announcing it.

 

"Alpha" is the stage where product testing begins in earnest. According to wikipedia (as good a source as any on things as nebulous as this) feature freeze is typically at the end of alpha, not the start. That's fair enough, I'll happily stand corrected there since some forms of testing may reveal that features need to change.

Still, by adding "depth" to the game this late I can't help but feel that the term "alpha" is being stretched beyond reason. It goes beyond features, as clearly not even the design they're derived from is anywhere near being finalised. So what on earth are you supposed to be testing against?

 

Companies tend to stretch terms pretty far these days. Still though most games I've had early access to that were in "alpha" stage were getting new features tacked on.

Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft being the two that most easily come to mind. With a little digging though I can come up with Planet Explorers, RimWorld and The Untitled Game (aka TUG).

Dwarf Fortress is a bit of a unique case though.

 

One of my mates has the RIGHT attitude towards this news - "I bought the Early Access for $8.50 and got 44 hours of solid entertainment out of it. I'm very happy."

There are so many idiots on the Steam forums making comments about this when they simply don't understand the concept of "Early Access". They think that it's the same as pre-ordering the game, but this is far from the truth.

I really feel for Double Fine on this one.

 

People talk about being disappointed in Early Access, but Minecraft brought me more enjoyment, even with most of its functionality missing initially, than a lot of AAA games.

 

Yeah - I feel like Early Access is all about buying "the experience" rather than the product. You're buying into the opportunity to see how the game develops and evolves when it's at its most experimental. By that measure, the people that bought Spacebase got what they paid for... they just didn't understand what they were buying (through no fault of Double Fine).

 

Precisely. Which is exactly why I've never been interested. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with it, it's that I go through that experience all the time anyway with my own games and the games being made around me, so I've little interest in getting that experience also from other developers I don't know.

I backed both Wasteland 2 and Planetary Annihilation, neither of which I even looked at again until release day.

So basically the word "alpha" has been devolved to the point where it just means "there are playable builds", then?

 

I'm EXACTLY the same. I back things now and then when I'm interested in the final product, but I won't touch Alphas or Betas. I'm only interested in complete games - when the "vision" is complete.

 

Pretty much.

Mostly similar only I occasionally pop open the alpha or beta when I'm bored.

 

And thanks for the reminder - I need to go buy Wasteland 2!

 

One big problem with Early Access is that people get bored of games easily. As an example, there was a game released in early access called Starbound (Minecraft/Terraria clone). For about a week, it was in the top ten on Twitch.tv. Then people got bored with it and moved on. Now almost no one plays it on Twitch.

The feedback from your playerbase is nice, but having a dwindled playerbase at release isn't so great ...

 

Only if gameplay is primarily multiplayer.

 

One thing I noticed with PA is that the game's built in instructions seem to assume that we've been along for the ride. There's not enough there for people who haven't been following it to quickly pick up all of the basics.

The built-in tute video assumes that you've never played an RTS and gets you to the point where you know how to build things and move them around. It then skips all the way ahead to "this is how you blow up a planet", without covering anything in the middle like "here's how you efficiently ferry units across a solar system". It completely skips most of the things that make it different to the RTSs that we've probably already played. So it really misses the mark in my opinion - we probably know how to build and move things around (how else would we have got interested in the game?) but we don't know how to do PA-specific stuff.

The sole reason I watched it was to find out how we're expected to get stuff from one planet to another in an efficient manner, but the video didn't even mention that.

 

I usually just send an orbital fabricator to another planet and then make it build a teleporter then transport my troops across. Game is awesome but can get frustrating from the lag and major bugs.

 

TotalBiscuit got wind of this earlier today, here's his thoughts on the matter...

Despite my (and, his) not being someone who works for that studio, I'm not entirely sure his perspective is necessarily accurate. For one thing, he names two possible scenarios - either someone's really bad at the business side of game dev, or the project was shutdown for failing to meet expectations, and I think that anyone could see those as being possible reasons. His idle speculation, however well-reasoned and based on press releases, still is idle speculation.

Where I agree, is that Early Access buyers are the ones getting fleeced as a result, and this highlights the darker side of Early Access. As a developer, I feel it means we should be more careful with how we handle Early Access, so that we don't run the risk of alienating our paying audience.

 

I find early access a hit or miss, I bought into several. About half of them I got easy 40+ hours, a couple 130 hours. Which is great considering how little I payed and how much more playtime I'll get with future updates.
The another half don't have a rich enough experience. But I don't feel screwed cause there's hope they'll get better. If they don't, they'll be another cheap game I got and don't play in my steam library.

 

The mindset for early access should be "if this is the last update, is this a good enough game." Nine times out of ten, they aren't.

 

Heh. Way back in the olden days (2010ish), when FB/social gaming was the money, it was common label the game as "beta" pretty much forever. (following Google's example) We had a very successful FB game that was in beta for about the 3 years. Right up to the point when the game was retired.

 

You could get away with it because the FB space was relatively empty at the time, and you just wanted to grab as many users as you could. Now you actually have to impress them.

 

Which is pretty sad, as it straight up says it is not a "pre-order" on the early access page.

Same here. Games fail, or fail to ship all the time, it's just part of life. But with funding coming from crowdsourcing, and heavy interest/involvement from the community by way of anticipation, and early access and just general excitement about the game, they happened to fail in such a huge public way. That must have a tense/rough time at the studio for that last month or so as the reality set in.

 

Actually... it was at the height of the boom, the space was packed (with both developers and players, it was just a more even distribution back then, now is highly polarized). The game was the most popular game on FB that year, and it even won best online game at GDC. (technically it is still live, we just sold it to another company). It pains me to say, but the reality was that the only reason it was in "beta" all that time, is we just never updated the landing page header.

 

I'm struggling to muster the sympathy to Double Fine like some in this thread. They seem to be burning through their goodwill as fast as their cash these days.

 

And maybe we begin to see why no publisher was willing to pony up the money to make DoubleFine Adventure, and they had to go the crowdfunding route?

 

It's not quite that simple. For instance Psychonauts got a metacritic score of 87, but it only sold 100,000 units in their initial release. Though they did sell more when they later put it on steam for a lower price.

Double Fine is respected in the industry because they like to try new, "artsy" things, even though their games don't sell as well as Call of Duty.

The thing is, whenever you try new things you're sometimes gonna fail. Spacebase DF-9 is one of those failures (well, not really a failure but definitely fell below expectations).

You don't see this a much with a company like, say, EA. They wait for someone to already to be successful, then they swoop in a buy them out. That way they minimize failures associated with their brand.

 

There is a reason for this. It's because new IP's don't sell. Full stop. There are very few games without a number on them that actually recoup development costs, especially when you add the fact that costs are almost always worse for the first in a series.

Double Fine in particular is notorious for missing milestones and running over budget. They make great stuff, but they can't stop themselves from going in the red.

 

Yeah EA buys these franchises and milks them till their teets are sore: Sims, Battlefield, NFL, Star Wars etc.

I wonder if that's what Double Fine would want to be, or if they'd just consider themselves sellouts for doing that.

 

I usually stay away from Early Access both because I don't want to risk getting bored by a possibly awesome game before it's fully developed and because I don't like paying to be a beta-tester (in the good ol' days you got payed to do that), unless you get a discount which often you don't get (absurdly, early access is often sold for more money than final releases). Still, I bought Spacebase DF-9 a week after it came out because I liked the idea too much. I played a couple hours, saw it was — obviously and understandably at that point — full of bugs, and chose to wait the final and feature-full release to enjoy it fully. Guess that day will never come, sigh :/

 

I really don't even consider this effort a "try". Even with EA you need to release a good bit of content to keep people happy for a while. DF-9 did not do that at all. I was following this from the beginning waiting for an excuse to buy this game, but there was never enough content to justify the purchase. Add to that the development was slow and the entire situation is baffling.

Double Fine misused EA and it blew up in their face.

 

Early Access is a relatively new thing. Are we even sure how it's supposed to be used?

 

Misused? Early Access pretty much describes itself. You are gaining access to it early in its development. Anyone who expects something more than a buggy incomplete game is setting themselves up for disappointment.

 

Sure, but the way it's presented it seems reasonable to expect that they're getting "early access" to a thing that will actually get finished. By the sounds of it, people don't feel that this is "finished".

As for the term "Early Access" describing itself, consider how the term has been used in the past. I recall it being used a lot for multiplayer games and MMOs to mean that you got a few days or maybe a week's access before the official release, for a game that was essentially finished.

It's easy for developers to know what you're getting into with an unfinished game. But the people Early Access stuff is being sold to aren't developers, they're gamers, and until Kickstarter/Early Access they've probably never been exposed to the exceptionally high failure rate of game projects - they typically only see stuff that's already committed to getting finished.

To me the implication is that in some cases Early Access is jumping the gun and getting too early.

 

Yes, misuse. Tossing a very early access against the wall and hoping its good enough to self fund development, otherwise it will be canceled, is flirting with shady behavior. If that is the plan at the very least it needs to be communicated so buyers can make informed decisions. Like I mentioned above I had been following this for quite some time and saw no mention of this before Tim Schafer's recent explanation of events. BrainMelter may be confused on what is a good use of EA or not, but I would like to think an EA that torpedoes your goodwill is a good example of what not to do.

I don't want to return to the bad old days of Giant Publisher controlling what games get made. Great new games are being made now thanks to Kickstarter and EA; games that would not have been made not too long ago. Too many high profile failures will scare away the funding for these games, and we'll be in stuck with soulless mass market games. Let's hope for more Wasteland 2's and fewer DF-9s.

 

From a Steam purchase page on an early access game:

This seems like sufficient communication to me.

 

Yep. It's pretty much a Kickstarter without the rules. It could be argued that the fans are taking all of the risk if it becomes apparent that the developer can just cut and run without consequence. And that's potentially fair enough if they know what they're getting into. It's just that there's a huge difference between "buy a cheap game and help out with the pre-release testing" and "help fund a game that may or may not ever get finished, and in return we'll give you access to some builds along the way". Neither are bad as long as players know what they're getting into.

 

Though of course it raises the issue that the question "what constitutes a 'finished' game?" requires a concrete answer. Flip it around, and it's clear that the developer of an Early Access game can't be beholden to whether or not each individual fan thinks the game is "done".

Nor should fans unwittingly be put in the position where they might be paying for a thing that never gets finished.

Where's the line to be drawn?

 

i guess thats the thing you might develop your game and realize damn I can't add features xyz and thats normally problem, but if you have been selling units in development with the promise of these features then that's the problem. For example paranatcial activity said they were going to multiplayer, and that was a big reason why people bought the beta, there final update says they are not going to include multiplayer.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/250580/

 

Oh, I think it *is* that simple. My point wasn't about the quality of DF games. My point was that they are *always* late and over budget by *a lot*. And publishers know that. They aren't willing to take on new DF games because they know this. All that talk about publishers not wanting to fund old-school games doesn't mean *anything* when coming from DF's mouths because they have major problems that publishers already knew about.

 

Which, as TotalBiscuit might say, "they are exceptionally bad at handling the business of their game development." Which, is a distinct possibility, with supporting evidence.

EDIT: Somewhat of a somber 2400th post, too...

 

Additionally, they seem to target niches that can't support them economically, or which at least have to be considered high-risk. There's nothing wrong with doing the latter from time to time, but it has to be balanced by a business that can otherwise absorb the downside of that risk should it eventuate. It's not sustainable to do consistently if it's all you're doing.

I know the feeling! I love Double Fine's games, and would even call myself a fan. Still, nobody should be above valid criticism.

 

The fact that they just did/do one offs doesn't help. If they had settled down and made psychonauts 2 and 3, normal trends in the industry being what they are, they would have probably made money by the end of it. It's one thing to dump a bunch of sequels, it's another to basically say "you see this niche? We own this S***."

 

I think the one-off nature of their stuff is a result of the nicheness of most of it. It doesn't reach enough critical mass to warrant sequel funding. For instance, with only 100,000 sales how could Psychonauts fund its own sequel?

I think they've planned them before but never been in a position to follow through. I'm positive I heard about a Brutal Legend 2 being cancelled, which would imply that there were at least significant talks about it.

 

Those are good points, too, yeah. Publishers are worried about more than just the current game. They want to know it has long-term potential as well. (And so do the customers!) DF's track record doesn't bode well for that.