More Games Need To Be Honest About Not Being Finished Yet

We are shy of two weeks out from the launch of Crimson Desert, and while I personally have been enjoying my time with the game, I feel it has been one of the more egregious examples of a modern trend in gaming: titles releasing as 1.0 when they should be releasing as Early Access.

Since the launch of Crimson Desert, the game has added a storage chest at the main hub for players to offload items they don’t want to carry, but also don’t want to lose. It’s added a bunch of fast travel points all over the map, including one at that main hub; before this, it took hours of gameplay to unlock a fast travel point, even if you were kind of close to that location. It’s also added new items known as Refinement Tokens, which allow players to quickly upgrade any low-level gear they come across to something more usable, without having to waste a bunch of resources in doing so. These aren’t little tweaks and fixes; these changes completely transform the experience of playing the game.

Before digital releases and internet connectivity, patches were nearly impossible, especially on consoles. Once a game was out in the wild, that was pretty much it. No changes could be made; any issues with the game or exploits players could leverage were forever etched into that experience. Now, developers are able to make alterations weeks, months, or even years after a game’s release. I do lament the idea of things like Pokémon Red and Blue’s Missing No., or the backward long jump in Super Mario 64, being removed in update patches if those games were to have been released today.

However, I do think the ability to improve upon a game’s potential after it has shipped, creating a better experience for those already playing and enticing newcomers who had been put off by hearing about its missteps, is a net positive, but the expectation of what people are getting at launch needs to be better set.

Let’s take Starfield, for example, which will launch on April 7 on PlayStation 5 along with a slew of additional updates. In the game, you’ll now actually be able to fly your ship between the planets in a star system, rather than being relegated to fast traveling to any given orbit and being limited to just that airspace. Actually being able to pilot your ship from planet to planet in a spacefaring game? What a concept.

In a previous update for the game, a year after its launch, a vehicle was added because navigating many of Starfield’s planets on foot was often a slog. This upcoming update is adding an even more versatile vehicle, because as it turns out, that initial REV-8 buggy still wasn’t efficient enough to explore some of the game’s more barren worlds. When new Starfield players pick up the game on April 7, they’ll likely be getting a vastly improved experience over the ones that jumped into the game when it launched in September 2023, and now, at a permanent $20 discount. To put it plainly, people paid money to be some of the first people outside of Bethesda to play that game, they voiced their feedback online, and then the studio took that feedback and used it to put out updates and improvements. That is the Early Access business model.

This isn’t to say that games that are released in 1.0 and then identify issues or ways to improve the experience shouldn’t make those adjustments, but there’s a difference between games that release feeling feature complete, but could use a few tweaks, and games that greatly adjust or, in some cases, completely rewrite their systems.

It’s apt to have this conversation now, as 2026 serves as the tenth anniversary of No Man’s Sky, a game that was derided at its 1.0 launch. Over the course of the next ten years, Hello Games continuously implemented update after update, which not only patched in some of the initial mechanics that the developer had said the game was meant to have but also built upon its foundations to create entirely new systems, turning it into a beloved experience and rewarding the developer with continuous sales of the game.

This is how things usually tend to play out for games such as these. The discourse around Cyberpunk 2077 was dire at launch. I’d never seen so much vitriol launched at a studio for releasing a game in the state that it did. A few years later? Hell, we even gave its expansion Phantom Liberty a 10/10, and the whole package is now considered one of the greatest RPGs ever made. We could still have that longtail success while also potentially avoiding the pain at launch if expectations were just set more appropriately.

One of the biggest roadblocks as to why I think studios avoid the Early Access model is maybe because of those adjusted expectations; that sales of a game will suffer at launch because people know that a better version of that experience will eventually be available. However, there’s a game being sold on Steam right now that defies that logic. At the time of writing, nearly a quarter of a million people are playing Slay the Spire 2, a game only a few weeks into its Early Access period, with its peak concurrents over half a million. Then there are titles like the Hades duology or Baldur’s Gate that see success in their Early Access period, and then when their 1.0 versions drop, they are in line for some of the best games ever made.

Yes, I know. We’re comparing a game from indie publishers and developers to games from publicly traded companies, but another recent gaming trend is how blurred the lines are becoming between indie titles, AA experiences, and AAA games.

The point is that the landscape of the industry is going through multiple, radical transformations, which is also leading to record studio closures, layoffs, and canceled projects. In order for the industry to come out healthier on the other side of all these changes, I believe transparency is a key element of that phoenix rising from the ashes. While I don’t think these games simply calling themselves Early Access would wave a magic wand and make the troubles of the industry disappear, I do think it’s one improvement that could be made in tandem with others to bring some stability back.

And of course, all these games I mentioned clearly weren’t expected by their development teams to be in the state they were at their launches during development; Early Access was never a part of the plan. But if these studios were to look at their games honestly, and then come out a few months ahead of launch and pivot to that business model, and clearly explain exactly why they were doing so, I think there’s a good chance players would have rewarded the games for such candidness. Rather than offering feedback with vitriol, they would be offering that feedback as a part of an understood, unofficial contract between themselves and the developer. You would be paying to help the developer identify pain points in the experience, essentially, but you would be purchasing the game with that knowledge.

It goes without saying that I fully expect more games to come out in similar ways to how Crimson Desert, Starfield, No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, and many other titles with troubled releases have launched. But we have an entire business model designed to avoid these unfortunate situations, and more studios should be taking advantage of it, regardless of indie or conglomerate status.