[solardev]

Is that a big deal? That's easy to avoid if you don't pre-order games and just wait for the day 1 reviews. Even if you did end up with a shitty situation, Steam lets you refund the games with minimal hassle.

On the other hand, there are players who'd rather have the game earlier (like me) than a few months later, despite its launch issues.

The alternative approach -- Baldur's Gate 3 being in Early Access forever -- is fine too, but damned if that wasn't a long wait.

Maybe the compromise is bigger companies being willing to release in Early Access more often. That shouldn't be limited to just indie companies, but any publisher that wants early and broad public feedback.

Especially for a city-builder game (where there isn't really a campaign or spoilers), I don't see why not...

[johnnyanmac]

large companies don't have much incentive to use EA. The usual incentive for EA is to make a game cheaper for early users and to get important playtesting done.a big game with a big ad budget, QA testing studio, and internal playteting doesn't need to worry about that.

[solardev]

Well, in this case, they were a 30 dev company that knew the performance was going to be so bad, they had to release a warning a week before the game came out. Seems like Early Access may have been appropriate, and maybe saves the review score too.

[johnnyanmac]

I thought it would go without saying, but devs don't control the release schedule. The best best solution is to simply optimize before release but they clearly weren't given that choice.

Publishers care a lot less about review scores, and never cared strongly about user reviews. They were so polarized to begin with that Steam changed it from numeric actors to up/down (or meh). It's a long running game and scores can improve.