John Buckley, Head of Communications and Publications at Pocketpair and Palworldis concerned that the culture of the gaming community has changed the perception of the Steam Early Access program.
According to him, gamers no longer treat such titles as unfinished products, but perceive them as regular finished games, which creates problems for developers like Pocketpair, which is still finalizing Palworld after version 1.0 was released.
Buckley recalls the time when Steam had just replaced the Greenlight program with an Early Access system. Then, according to him, “everyone knew what they were getting into” – buyers of such games wanted to be part of the development process, give feedback and communicate with the developers.
He called this period “a truly wonderful golden era” when the system functioned exactly as Steam intended.
Palworld shows that the Steam audience wants low-budget crafts while AAA titles are losing audience
That’s changed today due to what Buckley calls “the migration of hyper-casual mobile gaming and game-as-services culture” to the platform.
Now the culture has changed, and early access essentially no longer makes sense. People just buy an early access game like a regular game and treat it as such.
In the case of Palworld this results in complaints from players after a week or two of active playthrough that the developers supposedly “don’t make new content” and “the game is dead,” although the team simply needs time to develop updates.
Buckley emphasized that he does not consider it bad that part of the audience is not interested in the process of creating games – this is normal, “there is no judgment.” However, the situation is more complicated on consoles, as console players in general are not accustomed to the concept of early access and are less likely to provide feedback compared to the PC audience, which, as he puts it, “likes to be bombarded with bug reports.”
