Words Worth Knowing: Early Access
Words Worth Knowing was a vertical I wrote weekly explaining key pieces of gaming jargon to parents, guardians and teachers, as part of the larger overall GameHub outreach effort. The column ran for nearly two years and resulted in around 60 WWK articles. GameHubHQ.com closed in late 2017. This piece originally appeared on Dec 07, 2015.
What It Is: Early Access = Games released in an unfinished format, so players can see the game being completed around them as they play.
What It Means: Early Access games are games that are released for sale in an unfinished BETA or even ALPHA state. Players are usually invited to contribute feedback to the game as it is finished and in return receive regular content updates as the game is built. Due to their ever-changing nature, we cannot include Early-Access titles in the GameHub HQ database at this time.
Why You Care: Opinions on whether early access is a good thing, a bad thing or simply a scam are both varied and fervently held. Early Access is a new business model, and not without its critics, who point out that the players are paying for an unfinished product, that they then BETA test for free for the creators, essentially acting as non-salaried employees. Those in favour of the system argue that it provides a wage for content creators by allowing them to generate sales prior to launch and, by fostering collaboration between creators and consumers, a much larger scope and quality of game can be made than under traditional development systems.
