Are you finished with the first and second game yet?

I think the 'how it works' part really varies from one developer to the next. Some go InDev when a game is purt-near done, while others are nowhere close and take several years to get released. At least one has been pulled from InDev and will likely not show up here (was a vehicle combat game, forget the name). Some have seen a hefty price bump when they got close to release. Some are very responsive to the early-support community, and some others rarely put out updates or news.

Crapshoot-wise, it's a bit better than a preorder since the customer does get a chance to try the game and obtain a refund within a 14-day period.

Thank you :) that sounds pretty reasonable

I was not saying they were unfinished games my point was that selling games that you have yet to develop bundled with others you have finished it's a bad habit that is becoming increasingly common (as selling incomplete games), instead of selling all three games in one bundle they should have sold them separately as soon as they were been completed and usually it's clearly stated if you are pre-ordering something and this was not the case.

The "just an example" you quoted should be a sufficient answer.

25 years ago, Windows was getting an extensive backward-incompatible revamp every couple of years and getting games that were less than 2 years old to work was a cr*p shoot. It didn't help that the games were taking crazy shortcuts to work their magic on hardware that was very limited.

Also, sound cards were worse than graphics cards nowadays and it wasn't uncommon to be able to get the game to run, but not the sound. I found out how some of the classics I played as a teenager sounded like... years later.

As a non-technical user at the time, I can attest that getting things to work was incredibly frustrating for the layman.

Also, there were many games that were a buggy mess (thankfully, I didn't play the vast majority of those, because I read Gamespot reviews before buying... well, technically, Gamespot is 22 years old and 3 years before that, I was getting my games for free on floppies, I didn't have any money then), it's just that most of those games didn't pass the time filter and the games you see nowadays from that era are the gems.

Also, if you bought shareware at the time, you technically were paying what was essentially the demo of a game. Granted, it was cheap, but still...

Don't get me wrong, I have fond memories of the good old days, but I also like to keep it real.

Why pay testers when you can get testers to pay you. Plus your target audience tells you what they want so they know what to develop for their DLC. It's a great marketing strategy, and there's more than a few people who want to be first.

Nothing wrong with Indie games. Its up to the buyer to not be a big dummy and do some research first before buying. Asset flips, frauds and scams are easy to spot.

As a marketing strategy it can backfire. If the first testers that pay (buyers) don't find the quality sufficient, they might downrate and badmouth the game, especially since there weren't paid but paid for it.

Indies don't exactly sell like hot cakes and I have heard from quite a number of Indie developers making losses with their games. And if low quality becomes a trade mark of Indie games it could even hurt the good Indie games too.

From a development perspective it kind of makes sense to involve customers in the development process but one should be clear about it (still in beta or something) otherwise it might backfire.
If it is stated clearly customers can avoid this situation very easily. If it is not stated clearly, it's kind of fraud.

Yes. Of course. Like the big studios do and like Microsoft has been doing with their OS since the release of Win95.

And you only found out about this strategy now? Where have you been living?

If i would be picky I could say that 25 years ago Windows 95 was yet to be released ok there was Windows 3.1 but that was an application like any other, my post was referring to the first half of the 90's ... yeah ok that was almost thirty years ago ... no need to remind me :)
I tend to agree with the rest of your post, after the release of Windows 95 older games were sometimes difficult to run properly, they were already buggy? Maybe, but much blame was put on the newly released operating system and not the game itself, and for a good reason I might add.

But yeah, sometimes I tend to be carried away when speaking of the good old times so my judgment may not be completely objective:)