skeletonbow: Crap, I forgot about South Park Stick of Truth! I mega want to play that one one of these days!
You're probably right about the Early Access games since statistically now I think something like 85% of all games on Steam are either Early Access or the developers have only written 10 lines of code or less in the game so far. ;o)
koima57: I for one never came across that many early access games on Steam, to be honest. To be fair, I am not curious about releases, and focus on what I want to buy, and want to know. :P
Ahhh, so you don't load up the Steam storefront homepage then and look at it I imagine. ;) Seriously though, if you go to the homepage on Steam store and look at the gigantic top center promo spot on the page that auto scrolls every 5 seconds or so to highlight and promote new releases and sale items etc. an excessively large percentage of these are advertised as "Early Access" rather visibly and practically all the time. Lemme go check what the fraction is at the very moment for a sec...
I get:
10 - Now Available
4 - Pre-purchase
1 - Early Access
So at the moment just going by that alone there is the illusion taht it is just 1/15th of the available front page super promos which is low compared to par. On the average day it's more like 3-5 or more Early Access visible just from the above, or it certainly seems that way. However, if you open up each individual game storefront page you find that a lot more of them are Early Access labeled on their own store page that don't show up that way on the big promo. Of the 15 I highlighted above right now (one of which isn't even a video game but rather a music application I might add), here is the breakdown I get for the store page details:
3 - Early Access
3 - Prerelease
9 - Now Available
1 "now available" wasn't even a game, 3 of them are DLC, so the number of actual games that are currently available right now not early access or prerelease or DLC is pretty bad percentagwise just with this one highly visible metric on Steam. In my observation day in day out though it is usually much worse and seems like 90% of it is Early Access and Pre-releases most of the time, but that's just "feeling" and not hard numbers like above.
Throughout the rest of Steam the same is true though if you look through the list of games below that that show 10 at a time one on top of each other as "Top Sellers" for example and go through page after page there are tonnes of Early Access games, and they don't just sit there for a week or two, many of them are there like that for months and months and seemingly forever.
So I was kind of semi-joking about the "85%" above and exaggerating a bit, but only because the real numbers seem way higher than what I'd personally prefer them to be which is more like 1 out of 20 or fewer. I just end up not paying as much attention to Steam's direct content as a result and have only ever bought about 4 of the games I own on Steam directly from Steam, the other 300 games+keys coming from 3rd party stores/bundles/gifts/etc. :)
This practice doesn't upset or anger me though, it just makes me kind of non-excited about what I'm seeing and rather complacent and I don't stick around long to surf around looking at things, whereas I spend minutes/hours on GOG if not every day, many times a week usually. Kind of glad GOG isn't overloaded with Early Access or similar. The odd Pre-order is there such as The WItcher 3 right now but it's a small small amount compared to the ready to go released content. Sure prefer that much more. :)
