Early Access Fees - Why pay to play a broken game?

Not to mention the fact that there is always a chance that the content you played in the early release, not being in the final release of the game, having been either scrapped at the last minute, or held back to be rereleased in the form of DLC that you'd have to pay for again, since you technically only played the beta..

I've seen this happen with both mobile and console games..
 
Woah, some good replies. Sorry when I wrote angry I'm not sat at my keyboard punching the screen or anything. Let me put it this way, none of us here that I know of are beta testers, you know people who can find exploits/bugs and report them to be fixed. I have had access to almost every single World of Warcraft Beta and I never made it to max level on a single beta and I think I reported like 3 bugs in total which probably had already been reported.

Let's face it we are gamers and not beta testers and by paying for early access we just want to play the game "now". As for comparing it to kickstarters, I think it is a lot different IMO I last backed ShadowRun and thought they did a solid job apart from the game being a bit too quick to complete and no way of saving outside of way-points.
 
The concept does seem a little crummy, and I personally would never play $20 for an unfinished game that will be free in a month or two, but as long as someone who buys it understands what they're paying for, it's their own choice to do so.

richc3 said:
I forgot where I read it the other day, but there was talk about how the old cartridge games like the NES / SNES basically all worked flawlessly, but games nowadays always have bugs. Back then, they only had 1 shot to get it right whereas nowadays they can just patch it later.
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Earlier games had glitches just as newer ones do, but many of us never really found them. Pokemon Red and Blue were swarming with game-breaking glitches, yet no one noticed until as of late. With that being said, there is a lot more for game developers to mess up on now than there was back then, with modern games being thousands of times larger than NES games.
 
The point of buying a game in early access is so you can play it early, and sometimes games are cheaper if you pay for early access(Minecraft) Of course it's not always a good idea to buy a game in early access, I bought castle story before it came out, and when I played it, It was an absolute piece of crap the game was so buggy, broken and it was boring to play. But, I bought Minecraft when it was in Beta and I never regret it, so you gotta be careful when buying games in early access.
 
Personally, I wouldn't really pay that much money to play a "broken" game. I mean, the most that I'd pay is $10 for a game in its Alpha stage because it's still in its developing state. The thing is, paying for early access is quite risky because you never know when the creator wants to just give up. I remember paying for Minecraft Alpha, and I must say, it was worth it! The game developed quite well, and it still is!
 
I'm not paying for an unfinished game. End of story. I will not do some company's QA testing for them. They have people on hand for that. I'll wait till a games done to buy it.
 
I'm not too sure. I don't think it is that bad a thing. It allows the people that are willing to fork out the cash early to be able to, but in no way does it force people to. Also, it means that fans of the game can influence the road-map of development to a larger extent as they are the "in house" testers. 

Another great advantage is that the gamers that care enough, and want to be the ones to do things first and develop certain techniques to give them an advantage have that ability and can see the progression of how the game is developing from an early stage. Another advantage would be the increased feedback that is leaked from such beta trials. I realize that they aren't supposed to do this, but if a game is doing terribly in beta then that usually leaks out to the public, saving us money and time.
 
I'm pretty upset that this is becoming the norm for games nowadays. I bought the Rust alpha and I really loved the concept of the game and it was pretty fun for a while. But they haven't updated hardly anything since I got it. I bought an alpha expecting to watch it grow into a full game but this really isn't going anywhere right now. They have a blog where they tell us all the amazing things they want to put in it but there hasn't been a single content update. $20 to play a poorly made and laggy alpha. Oh well hopefully they will add stuff eventually.
 
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