[eropple]

One thing that absolutely has to end is that the idea that a game has now become free is a "slap in the face" to customers. Customers paid for the game then-and-there, where they bought it and when they bought it. Discounts are not "insults" to those customers and by extension neither is making the game free and (possibly?) open-source.

As for rebuilding the multiplayer: it sounds like they had about 30 concurrent players and minimal ongoing sales. That's a dead game and at that point, "cut bait" is not unreasonable; they're not exactly a giant developer with money to splash around. "Give players free keys to the new game and move on" is about as fair a path forward as they can make, and is doing pretty right by those players.

I didn't submit this story here to get the cheap-games-earn-a-lifetime-commitment crowd riled up. (And make no mistake: $25 is a cheap game. So's $60, for that matter.) I posted it because it's a great object lesson to back up your stuff. If I can be honest, I'm mildly regretting doing so after reading your post.

[philipov]

The practice of releasing a game in early-access undermines the notion that you are paying for a game there-and-now. Even games that get 1.0 releases are often incomplete or continue to receive free content updates. Planet Explorers was released in early access, so people who bought it were clearly investing in its future, not paying for it as it was then.

This kind of ambiguous relationship being pervasive in the industry muddles traditional notions of when the studio's commitment ends, which opens the door for misunderstanding and abuse.

[eropple]

PE's 1.0 came out in November 2016. It's well and truly out of Early Access and has been for nearly two years and the playerbase had dwindled to a rounding error.

And even with Early Access, you're still paying for it as it is at the time of purchase--you're buying for the now or for the hope of the future, you are not buying for any future commitments of any sort. If this isn't well-understood already, it had best become understood, because financial exigencies don't really leave a lot of room for "but I bought it in Early Access!".

The finances of games are brutal and punishing and the race to the bottom that consumers have happily encouraged has resulted in those consumers' investment not being valued nearly as much. This was foreseeable and is inevitable. The best way to be reasonably assured that the games you like continue to be worked on, maintained, and managed is 1) pay a lot more for them up front, or 2) play games with ongoing subscription systems. As-is? It is economically non-viable to throw money after 30 concurrent users and nobody with a pocket calculator could fault them for it.