Uh.. lol I think that TotalBiscuit & company talked about Towns game status in the last Co-optional Podcast before this announcement!
Now I await their next comment about it XD

Kinda sorta, I was more emphasizing the fact that people are beginning to take legal action against some of these devs who don't make good on their promises.

Although, supposedly the dev's wife is suffering from cancer and the medical expenses have put them in financial hardship. This is the internet though so, take it with a grain of salt.

Great post overall (sorry for the financial loss) but this last piece of advice is a real eye-opener. That's what actually really should happen. People should only back KS projects or fund alpha stage games if the developer publishes somewhat extensive business information. Don't do it without. The only exception is maybe if the developer has a history of delivering.

I don't see why you think it works that way, when it's clear that a lot of people are risk averse, and not interested in buying an incomplete game. By this reasoning projects on Kickstarter, especially those which continue to sell the game throughout development, would expect few sales, but that's not necessarily how it works. If the games ends up well, the large number of people who don't buy incomplete games will buy it.

The main problem with releasing a game before it's ready is that it can leave a bad taste in gamers' mouths, which translates to bad reviews. People searching for the game after it's released will find these reviews, even if the game has been greatly improved.

Prices play very little into it, IMO. From a monetary point of view it's vastly preferable to get paid for an incomplete game than not get paid and as a result not have the game released. That and feedback at an early stage are the major benefit of early access.

As for prices, most indies report that sales are where they make most of their money, so the price point set doesn't necessarily matter that much. It's just a way to make sales look better, and perhaps get a few suckers.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with early access or alpha buying. No one forces people to do it, no one is making people invest their money in incomplete games.

This is an issue of personal morality and accountability. By all accounts the lead devs simply stopped working on Towns by their own decision. I can understand burnout and not wanting to do something anymore; but they were paid (quite handsomely) for their work and promises. To not attempt to achieve those promises is a serious personal flaw of accountability.

I look at games I've Alpha'd such as Mount & Blade (do many people even know this was an alpha-funded game nowadays?), Minecraft, and others. In all the good situations the developer put their work into the game until such a point where it was releasable, and then and only then did they move onto other projects/upgrades to the game.

You can't just simply state "Alphafunding is evil" because a few people abuse it. Some developers who really want to make their game desperately need the extra financial help to pull it off. I always look back on Mount & Blade for this situation. Without alphafunding the game wouldn't have been possible, and without M&B you're looking at no Warband, M&B2, Chivalry, War of the Roses, and all those other games built off the M&B design and ideas.

What is the current state of Towns? I haven't touched it since the Royale Alpha collection #1 (and to be honest, it was looking pretty cool back then).

People are paying to be beta testers.

They probably deserve to get burnt tbh. Although it's of course not nice to see stuff like this happen.

Let's be fair, those guys who pay full price for a buggy game on release or pre-release are great.

They test the game for me, iron out many bugs and usually pay at least double the price which goes to support the developpers' next endeavor.

Slogans are fun!

(to bad Towns, the game in question, was sold as a complete game - not an alpha)
You know, all Alpha's I have bought are cheaper than full versions... the only place this is not so, is on Kickstarter, where the ALpha tier is usually a bit higher up. But games sold as Alphas / Betas are usually 50-80% less than full versions (depending on state of completion)

Very true. And even failures aren't always abuse. A developer could get a loan and use that to live on until the game/whatever is done, but the benefit of alpha funding is to avoid needing that to happen. If a project collapses then all I, as a backer, lose is the tiny sum of money I already decided I was willing to risk losing, and nobody needs to auction their house.

Not only that, you also get a game in alpha / beta stages to play around with. Many of them are very fun, even in its current stages. I think it is many times better to have played an alpha and lost it, than never have played it at all.

That's what Arcen did with A Valley Without Wind. They were dissatisfied with the way the first game turned out, but realized that they wouldn't be able to address the shortcomings unless they did a bigger redesign. So they started work on A Valley Without Wind 2. And since they realized that AVwW 1 hadn't really fulfilled the plans that they had announced for it, they gave the sequel away for free for everyone who owned the first game.

Personally I was pretty happy when they did that, and I think it's a viable course of action if you painted yourself in a corner in terms of expanding the game you're developing, but of course it needs to be done right, and with a good feeling for the community's concerns. Arcen did it right, imho, and that's also a reason why (for example) I immediately bought "The Last Federation" when it came out. I simply trust Arcen to take the right decisions even when things go wrong.

For an alleged "Towns 2", though, I doubt that those devs would take that route. Given that the concern is Towns not earning enough money (contract issues aside), they would probably be reluctant to give a sequel away for free.

That's not what I'm saying. I am overwhelmingly the kind of buyer who won't buy until the game is complete, and I'm sure there are many others. But by bundling the game they are getting it very cheaply into the hands of users, including those like myself who wouldn't have picked up in advance otherwise. Now they have lost that sale to me, and to anyone else who would have waited for the final version.

The problem is that these don't happen in a vacuum. When you get a lot of poorly done early releases, and couple them with games that never get properly finished, then you build up a hostile marketplace that makes it harder in general for games to get made at a fair profit for the devs. Unless you're one of those dickhead devs who is content with "hey, I got my money, enjoy your unfinished game bitches!", no one prospers from this mechanism.

They are still cutting into their buyer base, which is finite, by harvesting the fruit before it's ripe.

Anyway, I'm done talking about this. It's tedious now and I've made the points I want to. Ultimately the market is a complex system and there is no one pattern that applies to all of it, so one must understand the myriad nuances that go into it. You either do or you don't (impersonal you usage).

I agree. Thanks for an interesting discussion.