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When will the next "E.T." moment happen in the industry?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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It both wont ever happen, and has already happened.
ET only had the impact it had because the industry was small. Relatively speaking.
Today, production (both indie and AAA tbh) is diverse enough, that no one game could ever taint the whole industry to that extent again.
What we are seeing, instead, is more and more people who resolve "I'm never giving ubisoft/blizzard/EA/a gacha/a mobile game my money again" but still buy and play games. They just start getting more and more invested in what kinds of industry practices they want to discourage/encourage.
As an example, pre-ordering, while still something people do, is now pretty much universally understood to be a bad idea. No Mans Sky and Fallout 76 were such massive phenomenon, merely mentioning one or the other is a complete comeback to anyone trying to tell you pre-ordering something is a good idea.
Sure, NMS became a good game, eventually, but that didn't retroactively make pre-ordering it a good move when it only became worth buying 12 months after launch.
Another great example, is Suicide Squad. People were interested, right up until it was revealed it was a live service game. Hype fell off a cliff, and nothing WB did could have brough it back. It wasn't what fans of the Arkham games wanted. People passed it by before it even launched.
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Concord.
Pre-ordering is dead, live paid alpha testing is booming. There are so many games in development (alpha or beta testing) which can be bought. And as soon as the game is in the ballpark of "finished" it get's the v1.0 mark. And way before that, there are already DLC's available for an unfinished game.
I assume you're referring to stuff like Tarkov or Star Citizen?
These games basically work the same as live service games, except they pretend to be "in development".
But I'd hardly call it a boom. There's only a couple truly big money makers, the rest are grifts that don't really go anywhere, but might have small vocal cult-like fanbases.
Then there are games that really do use the "Early Access" model to fund getting the game made. It's not really like kickstarter, or preordering, because you do get something in exchange for your money, immediately. And you can look up reviews and videos and see exactly what you are getting. People don't buy early access games just to wait a couple years to play them. They buy them to play them right now.
And it has brought us games like Satisfactory, DRG, Hades, Subnautica, Everspace...
Even Baldurs Gate 3 was an Early Access title. You could buy and play it for YEARS before "1.0" dropped and became the explosive success it is today.
Those games got made because they were able to sell copies to fund their development throughout the process. And instead of trying to please clueless investors, they had to please the players.
I don't really see why you'd be salty about this part of the trend. Obviously some stuff is not worth buying, but that's true whether a game is finished or not.