hexgrid

I think partly it's the time investment. In my experience strategy gamers tend to skew slightly older than average, and older implies the likelihood of decreased spare time. If I could go back to being 12 again and sink a summer vacation into playing a really meaty game, I'd probably do it with a paradox game. Between game development and having a family, I haven't had a real holiday since... uh... 1996? I think? But I still remember spending summers playing games as a kid...

Another good podcast. Oddly, knowing Leviathan Warships was known as "Floaty Boats" internally makes me slightly more tempted to buy it. Especially after that ad campaign.

I really need to give EU a fair shake this time. I tried it briefly when I didn't have enough time to invest to really get into it, and have been meaning to get back to it ever since.

What we're working on at the moment isn't exactly that (it's a wargame, not a 4X), but I think you'll like the setting...

On the interesting decision issue, isn't the difference between (say) Civ and VicII in that sense just a question of how well you need to understand the game before you can identify what those decisions are? Both games offer you a spectrum of decisions both interesting and uninteresting. Civ gives you less scope for interesting outcomes in order to make identifying the interesting decisions easier. VicII gives you a vast array of potential interesting outcomes, but the cost is learning to navigate the decision landscape and determine which parts matter.

Good episode. I should pick the game up.

The problem is the definition of "ready to ship". Back before there was an easy method for patch distribution, "ready to ship" meant "we're very sure this works as advertised and has no crash bugs". Now that it's easy to patch, "ready to ship" means "it worked for us, and users willing to use a beta have a cross-section of configurations our QA guys could only dream of". Some of it is definitely economic pressure and the fact that the public has gotten used to it, but some of it is also that the increasing complexity and diversity of hardware platforms means the old way just wasn't working very well. A good friend of mine worked on FF7 PC. They tested the hell out of it, and it was a direct port of a Playstation game to PC. Once it got out in the field it started crashing on some machines. It turned out to be the movie player, which would crash if it wasn't fed data quickly enough. The Playstation CDROM drive was listed as 2x speed, and it was really 2x speed. PCs with 16x and 32x CDROMs were only rated that speed because that's how fast they streamed data out of cache; their actual transfer rate was closer to 1x over the long haul. The QA team had tested PC 2x and 4x CDROM drives and thought they'd got all the slow ones, and never thought to check to see if the ones that claimed to be fast were actually the bad ones. So, they tried hard to ship good, classical release quality software, but got bitten by a bad assumption about hardware vendors not lying.

I thought Rebellion actually did a pretty bad job. At the low level, the fleet battles were mostly a numbers game with the illusion of tactics; I never found it made any difference how I attacked; the fleet that looked best on paper was usually the one that won. The game also really felt wrong to me; it seemed like the developers were making a game set in its own fiction, and then the chance for a Star Wars license dropped out of the sky and they spent six or eight weeks frantically replacing assets. Most of the ships available to the rebels looked like nothing from Star Wars, and (more tellingly) IIRC the available equipment for the sides were balanced; as the rebel player you were cranking out dreadnoughts that were every bit as powerful as the largest ships the imperial side could field. What I wanted from the game personally was something akin to what we later got from AI War; a game where you're running a rebellion against a mighty empire that could obliterate you in a moment if it could only find you. Where you start out with no assets except a few key people and maybe a far-flung base, the ignorance of the power you're fighting, and pockets of sympathetic populace here and there. What I got instead was pretty obviously a 1v1 clash of empires in space game with Darth Vader jammed into it at the last minute. It's an interesting game; there are certainly some things about it that kept me playing, though I think some of that may have been a bloody minded determination not to let the game beat me. Ultimately, though, I found the flaws outweighed the good qualities.

Related: http://www.spacegamejunkie.com/oped/spacing-out-trouble-4x-games-or-wtf-them/

I'm far more hopeful about this than I used to be. Check out the podcast on early access and the ensuing thread for lots of people's thoughts on the subject. I know I'm now working on projects I'd never have even considered before non-publisher funding became a viable option. The AAA funding model is broken, and it's not doing anyone any good; not the publishers, and certainly not the developers or the players. Early access and crowdfunding are a way out of the trap, at least for the developers and the players. I'm perhaps a bit of a heretic on this, but I think the stone-age-to-interstellar-travel 4X has been left to Civilization because it's really kind of boring as a story, and it forces abstractions that either over-complicate the early game or (as in Civilization) hamstring the late game. Consider how the tech tree works in Civ. Early in the game, you're working on technology that took thousands of years to develop; pottery, metalworking, animal husbandry, and so forth. Some of these were extremely long-scale projects; domesticating wildlife into farm animals isn't something that just happens, even once you've decided it might be a good idea. My grandmother died a few months back. She was born in 1911, less than a decade after the first powered flight. Industry and agriculture in the world she was born into was still dominated by steam power and horses. By the time she died, we had stood on another celestial body and had a space probe on the verge of leaving the solar system. We went from Nobel thinking that the invention of dynamite would end all wars to being able to end all vertibrate life in world on half an hour's notice. The change in the rate of technological development in the last few hundred years is unbelievable. Your phone probably has more computing power and more storage than the entire world had in 1970. My first computer ran at 500KHz and had 3K of RAM, and it ran rings around the punchcard-fed room computer that my dad used in university. Civilization is stuck modelling this exponential curve with the same mechanism it used to model the development of pottery, and it really doesn't work very well. It also assumes a very rigid track for technological development. There are solid "must have researched all available tech to cross this line" points in the Civ tech tree, which means that (for example) everyone from the Aztecs to the Zulus are going to develop mounted knights before they figure out what a bank is, even if they never actually see a horse. A similar problem applies to the military simulation. Of necessity, it models all military units the same way, which means there's no way of modelling all sorts of very interesting military developments. We know guerrilla war dates at least back to Julius Caesar's time (since he fell afoul of it and didn't much like it), but there's no good way to model it in Civ. It's just 2nd generation armies bashing into each other. There's no model for all sorts of interesting military developments, and there *can't* be, because it would make the game too complicated to play and develop. Civilization's scope is too big for its own good; it's hoeing its own row because nobody else wants it. I'd far rather play a game that covers a tighter chunk of history (maybe Philip of Macedon's reign, or something set in the Water Margin, for example) where the game mechanics and the story don't fight so much. That's not to say I don't play Civ and enjoy it, but as an idea it has fundamental flaws that make it a bad series to copy. In my opinion, that's why so many 4X games are fantasy or science fiction. It lets the designer limit the change in scope of the game, and frees the game from the shackles of historical development. When your technologies are made up and your conflicts are all of the same tech era, you don't have to bend things to make them fit.

I think this is the core of the problem with traditional 4X; the scope of the game changes so much during the course of play that the answer should be evolving depending on what stage your empire is at. At the beginning, you're playing (metaphorically) the mayor of a small town. Then the mayor of a city. Then the head of a municipal/prefectural government. Then the head of a province/principality. Then the head of a major power, and then a superpower. Those roles all have different expectations and different scopes for micromanagement, and as you move up the chain what you ought to be focusing on changes completely. Your friendly local head of state doesn't spend his/her time appointing school board trustees and negotiating garbage collection contracts. Your local mayor may dabble a bit in diplomacy (especially business diplomacy, if you live in a large city), but that's ancillary to most of what they spend their time doing. I can't offhand think of any 4X that actually acknowledges this. You can be emperor of a million suns, and you're still expected to lay out every new fiddling little colony, design every last ship, direct every last battle, answer the civiphone when all the AIs decide it's been gosh several turns since they last asked for open borders so they could go sightseeing in your countryside with their tanks... By the end of a 4X game, if anything you should be spending time fighting fires that your subordinates lit. Someone on your team got too ambitious and annexed a system they shouldn't have, and now you've got Lord LLw'dwd of the 'Xw'Dw'hhzl threatening to roust up an armada to deal with your effrontery. The research team on Cygnus-V has accidentally infected themselves with rogue AI implants and you have a civil war on your hands. The new Star Crusher is massively over budget and looking distinctly like it's going to be a total lemon if it ever reaches production, but there's a senate lobby trying to keep it going because it's employing half their voters and they won't approve your new secretary of war. The discovery that the core of an ancient supernova remnant is solid gold causes the gold market to collapse and several of your major banks are completely insolvent... Instead, you're still this protean authority figure, dealing with every crisis from the smallest to the largest, and the threats you face are just bigger versions of the threats you faced at the beginning. If there's a cat stuck in a tree or an enemy invasion, you're the one who deals with it, and there's probably never going to be a problem that couldn't have happened in the first 10% of the game. There will be no bureaucratic crisis, no diplomatic crisis (unless you goof somewhere), no private sector crisis like a bubble market collapsing or war profiteering. No interlocking alliances blowing up in everyone's face when some minor player goes off the script. No analysis failure crisis like the one that caused the Soviet Union to crash, where they thought they were spending a reasonable percentage of GDP on defense until someone checked and found that the numbers were being fudged and refudged as they passed up through the hierarchy, and that defense spending was breaking them. So, I don't think it's enough to ask if the player is (for example) playing admiral/architect in a 4X game. It's necessary, but not sufficient. How the player's role changes as the game changes scope is a critical component of the equation, and it's one that has largely been ignored.

Sounds excellent, actually, though it also sounds like something that should have been split into several games. It seems like the development effort of building a good 4X game with a competent AI that can play it, plus the development effort of a good tactical battle system the AI can handle, is probably beyond the pale for most developers. Aside from anything else, it adds the whole problem of the strategic AI needing to understand what sort of production path it should be following to feed the needs of the tactical AI. That's the sort of thing where a minor tweak in the way the tactical AI behaves can break the strategic AI and ruin the game. I need to get my hands on a copy of this. It doesn't seem to be on steam, gog or desura. Hmm: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ad-infinitum/

I'm not sure it's misunderstanding; I'm coming at this as a developer who likes 4X games and has a couple of 4X designs backburnered (and one thing on the front burner that is borderline 4X and definitely strategy set in space). There are a couple of things at play here: - I think the reference to the hon. Mr. Space Rumsfeld's comment about the golden age of the PC when the limits imposed by the platform matched the limits imposed by what people's brains could process is probably closest to the heart of the issue, partly from a developer point of view but also partly from a player point of view. So there's also an element of Zacny's "stop listening to your fans" here; many players also think they want more, and they want everything. Take ship/unit design, for example; it's nearly always touted as a positive, when at least to me it seems like needless complication. Or take the baroque tech trees with their series of unique technologies, when (for example) both Armada 2525 and Neptune's Pride have shown them to be unnecessary. But as the developer, when you say 4X and don't have those, you're going to be facing questions about the lack of them, and some people will walk away because they aren't there. - A lot of the 4X market is currently driven by people wishing they could play Master of Orion or Master of Magic again, so there's a lot of player expectation gravity pulling a potential 4X developer in that direction. There's also the question of what publishers will fund, though it seems like we're finally getting past that dark age. There's nothing paradoxical about corporate fascism (cf: Nazi Germany, for example), unfortunately, but yeah, it does kind of rankle when the tech tree invariably has things like "market deregulation" which just adds 15% to your production without any of the garment factory fire or fertilizer plant explosion consequences. On a similar note, I wish this had funded: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/terminus--3 The end of the solar system as a habitable place is coming via giant space rocks, you've got a few decades to build a colony ship to save as many people as you can by strip-mining the world. Most of your decisions are supposed to be about risk/reward tradeoffs; do you slap together a massive nuclear plant to supply power for your factories and risk it melting down because it was built in a week, or do you spend the time to build it properly and risk the whole project with delays? You don't have enough time to do everything properly, so where do you gamble? Sturgeon's Law applies here; on being told by someone that 90% of science fiction was crap, he supposedly responded with what became his law: "90% of *everything* is crap". I think it's less a question of theme or scenario, and more a question of goals; IIRC Rob touched on this in the podcast. Many of these games don't do a very good job of answering why you're doing this. I find even the Civilization series falls down here; I'm striving to be the first across any one of an arbitrary set of finish lines, so I can "win history" somehow. I think what is needed is either something like Europa Universalis where you can effectively set your own goals, or something where the conquest has a purpose beyond king of the hill. Not that there's anything wrong with king of the hill, but we have a few of those now and there's no real sign that they're going to become scarce. I'd like to see games where you're salvaging what you can from a collapsing empire, or trying to unify a faction-ridden empire against an existential threat. I'd like to see games where the conflict is driven by actual needs, where the resources you're trying to grab are necessary rather than just desirable; it looks like At The Gates may be offering some of this. I'd like to see terrain used as a resource more often; space 4X games usually don't have a concept equivalent to being deployed on a ridge line. I'm itching to talk about our current project here, because a lot of it meshes with this discussion. I'm keeping the wraps on a little longer because the design is still a little in flux and we've got some stuff to nail down.

What trips up the AI? Is the game too complex, or is it the classic "AIs don't just can't do diplomacy" problem? Or something else?

I'm often amazed at just how strong the dichotomy seems to be between theme-first people and mechanics-first people. I tend to be mechanics-first myself, but for some reason a lot of people working in the 4X space seem to be theme-first. Jon's right out there in front carrying the flag. The dichotomy seems to be based on whether a person's motivation to play the game is based on generating stories or tackling intellectual challenges. Depending on how you weight those two goals, you'll care more about theme or mechanics, respectively. I'm fairly far towards the intellectual challenge / mechanics end of the spectrum, partly because I started playing in the 8 bit days when theme was delivered mostly in the copy on the box the game came in, and maybe the instruction manual. To extend your Chess example, is chess any better/worse when played with a civil war chess set? It's got a theme now, and if you'd never encountered the game before it's actually a decent (if abstract) match for the game mechanics. So is Civil War Chess better? I'd argue not much, if at all. Would Civil War Checkers be better than normal Chess? I'd argue no, even though one has a theme and the other is purely abstract. There are definitely places where theme can help a lot; Warhammer 40K would be the classic example of a theme that can paper over a lot of minor mechanical deficiencies in a game just by being so bonkers. A lot of people will buy a Star Wars game just because it's Star Wars, though they may wind up not playing it much. The ideal is that you have excellent mechanics married to an excellent theme. If something has to give, though, I'd rather it was theme. I think there's another problem, and it's one that has come up in earlier episodes. 4X games don't really have an endgame. They have a midgame that just peters out when someone crosses a victory point threshold. It's something that meshes with (and is partly a consequence of) the micromanagement problem; in most 4X games by the time you reach the midgame you've got so many plates to keep spinning that it's hard to do anything else. I think the fundamental problem here is that while your role in a 4X game changes, ultimately your interface with the game does not. What needs to happen if the scale keeps going up is the game needs to start supplying competent virtual viceroys to deal with the less important things. You shouldn't still be doing things like ship design or colony layout management or citizen job slot allocation once you're managing an empire. The whole point of bureaucracy and hierarchy in real life is to stop the guy/girl at the top from being swamped in minutia. If you're emperor or president or prime minister and you're making decisions about whether to have four or five workers in a given factory making shoes, your government is insane and broken, and you will be invaded and ruined by a country run by someone who knows how to delegate. As the scale of your charge goes up, the scale of what becomes minutia also goes up, and the game should be supplying viceroys to deal with that. That was actually the genius of the older Koei "Romance of the 3 Kingdoms" and "Genghis Khan" games. They started as pure military sims, but the further along you got the more they became about managing your bureaucratic corps and ultimately dynastic management. It's also, by the way, a dynamic you can watch ruin real companies in the real world. When a company crosses the tribal limit boundary (somewhere between 70 and 200 people, the limit to the number of people you can know intimately on a day to day basis), the management style has to change. A lot of small companies go up on the rocks and are destroyed trying to cross that boundary when the president/owner fails to realize they don't scale infinitely. I'd really like to see more games like this. Or games where the interactions are more political and faction maneuvering, with the threat of military action hovering in the background. For that matter, it would be fun to play a 4X which takes place in something like the Star Control 2 universe, where there's a somewhat established political order, but some giant threat is coming that the fragmented political system can't handle. So, the options are to try to cobble together a coalition to deal with the problem, sweep everyone else off the table so you can meet the problem yourself, or all die separately.

I spent most of this episode nodding in agreement, with occasional breaks where I lost the thread of things while thinking about how cool it would be to play the suggested Europa Universalis-esque Warhammer 4K game. And wondering how much the license would cost. Or the license for Dune or one of Frank Herbert's other political universes, like the Jorj X McKie stuff. Ok, thinking about that, I would pay many monies to be able to play a game like that as the head of the Bureau of Sabotage. Or the head of a major house in CHOAM. Or something set in Keith Laumer's Bolo universe, which is one of those "why has this never had a game set in it, let alone a strategy game?" story sets. Or something set in the universe of Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat. Edit: The 4K game, Laumer's Bolo universe and Dune potentially offer solutions to the "who am I?" question. All of them have variants of the superhuman hyperaware ruler. For that matter, I'd really like to see something set in the kind of 70s "cartoon communism won 400 years ago, the computer runs everything, and everything is white plastic and white spandex jumpsuits" universe that games like Suspended were set in. Aside: I always thought in the original star trek the Klingons were the space Mongols, the Romulans were the space Russians. At any rate, I'm in definite agreement with the podcast. I've only ever enjoyed designing my own spaceships in one 4X game, Stellar Crusade. It was a DOS game SSI published (written in Turbo Pascal, IIRC), and while it looks a little rough now it was pretty cool at the time. In SC, ships had components, but they just took "units"; a ship could hold a maximum of 15 units of stuff. Most components took 1 unit, some better things took 2 units (long range weapons, a couple of other things), and one thing (the i-drive) took 13 units. The i-drive was basically for building space submarines; it let ships go into "i-space" where they could only be attacked by i-space weaponry (for 'i-space' read 'underwater' and for 'i-space weaponry' read 'depth-charges' and it makes sense), so it was a big compromise to add, but made excellent raiders. Components never changed size, and there was no research tree. You started with access to everything. Research was this really abstract thing called "efficiency"; any production you didn't spend on anything else in a turn went into research, and research boosted your efficiency stat. When you designed a ship, it got a snapshot of the efficiency at the time you designed it, so all ships built to that template had the same efficiency. What efficiency did was act as a multiplier on everything; damage, range, speed, max jump distance, everything. So, more efficiency meant a ship was just better in every respect. To refit a design to current efficiency, you just opened it in the designer and saved it again. Done. I think you had to futz with your production queues to restart building them, but that was it. The static component sizes and the lack of component positioning meant you could customize your ships fairly well without having to micromanage them. Everyone should probably check out Armada 2525. Not 2526; that's the current one, and while it's a decent 4X game, it's 2525 that's the interesting one. It's pretty old at this point; another DOS game, and you can find it on abandonware sites. There are a few interesting things about it, one of them being how research works. Research in Armada 2525 is broken into several (was it 8?) tracks. Things like "weapons" and "communications" and "biology" and the like. You were trying to get levels in different tech tracks, and spending production on them gradually worked the levels up. What made this interesting is that all the technologies (including things like ship designs) had prerequisites that were based on levels in these tracks, so (for example) level 5 weapons and level 8 biology might get you a virus bomb. Crossing the prerequisite thresholds got you the tech. It worked really well, and as a system I could see it meshing really well with asymmetrical sides; maybe the silicon-based lifeforms suck at researching biology but are pretty good at researching computers, for example. I've lots more thoughts, but I'm going to let this digest a bit. It was a good episode, especially considering what I'm working on right now.

I've thought about it a bit more, and I will say there's one glaring example of a kickstarter campaign I've stayed far away from. Project Godus. For me it's the perfect example of a project that might some day produce something worth playing, but (a) it's likely to be nothing like as ambitious or interesting as promised (given the track record of the designer, I don't think that's an unfair assumption), and (b ) feel no need to be dragged along in the wake of it until it gets wherever it gets to. So, I can understand where the "I don't pay for half-built toys" crowd is coming from; I'm with them occasionally. But then a kickstarter comes along for something like StoneHearth or Jagged Alliance: Flashback, and I'm considering whether I can spare some cash...

The impression I had was that they came into the episode thinking that the discussion was going to revolve around cases where the model is exploitive, and on discussing it realized that it can be good or bad, so the conclusion was more "huh, I guess it's less cut and dried than I thought when we were planning this podcast". Even absent the development model, this is the classic game marketing problem; you can't put the gameplay on the box. Screenshots of Chess, Go or Diplomacy make them look like the most boring thing ever. So the marketing becomes unhinged from the product. It's been that way from the start; have a look at a youtube video of someone playing Pitfall or Yars Revenge, and then see if you can dig up the box on google images. Read the box copy and look at the art, and see how much relationship there is between that and what was on the cartridge. I really have to disagree here. Promo trailers and the like can only spoil story elements or visual effects, not gameplay. It's the games that rely on cinematics or flashy graphics that can be spoiled by trailers and screenshots. Games that rely on their mechanics don't really spoil. The gameplay of Minecraft was compelling even in its early state, it's just as compelling today. Kerbal Space Program is just getting more and more interesting the further along it gets. Sure, too much preview spoils the kind of on-rails semi-interactive movies that pass for AAA games these days, but unless they ship in a broken state I don't think early access to a strategy game does anything to harm it.

I need to get back to xcom. It's not quite the game I wanted, but it's close enough that I'm still happy to play it.

There's probably a semi-useful lesson to be taken from tennis here; they do 2v2 in tennis as well, but (in my admittedly small, largely uninterested in watching sports experience) people mostly talk about 1v1 tennis.

Any development model is open to abuse. Look at the current brouhaha over Aliens: Colonial Marines; I haven't played the game, but if the allegations are true (ie: that either the publisher or the developer released a presskit that misrepresented the game badly enough to wander into "fraudulent" territory) it's not like this is an isolated event. I remember watching the art director at a triple-A studio I worked at a decade or so ago photoshopping "screenshots" for a presskit. Hell, IIRC the "screenshots" on the original Wing Commander box were actually from a super high res version they had running on SGI graphics workstations; it certainly looked way better than the game had any hope of managing on a 320x200 8bit display. Remember Darklands? It was sold as a finished product. I don't know if it was ever stable enough to play all the way through, but I remember when it was relatively new it was notoriously buggy, and even the most diehard fans of it I knew threw their hands up after the publisher said they were done trying to fix it. I think it was patch K that went out with "there will be no patches after this" in the changelog. Battlecruiser 3K? I remember in the 90s buying UMS 2, the Universal Military Simulator 2 for PC for what at the time was a huge price. The box said it would let you simulate Any Battle in History! Except when I opened it I discovered that all that came in the box was an engine with a single crappy scenario and a mail-order catalog full of scenarios I could buy. I agree with Tom; if the developer is asking for money for something, it is de facto fair game for review. Sticking "beta" or "alpha" on it is certainly a statement of intent, and should be mentioned in the review, but it shouldn't insulate the game from criticism. As I said earlier, I think everything is basically beta these days whether the developer admits it or not. If you haven't fired up your game platform of choice for the last week, chances are something has been patched in the interim. What "beta" means now is more what "alpha" used to mean; feature complete but probably buggy. "Gold" now means what "beta" used to; "we fixed all the showstoppers and most of the non-cosmetic bugs, but heavy testing will probably turn up things that need fixing". People are now openly talking about "minimum viable product" as the point where you should start releasing to the public. And honestly, the increased complexity of software in the past decade means that's unlikely to change in the near term. Early release has the virtue of being honest about all this. It's at least telling you that there are going to be rough edges, and if you want the polished product then watch this space but don't get your wallet out just yet. It's also telling you that if you like the idea you can vote for it now with your money and play it when it reaches whatever level of polish you're happy with. Or hold off and pay when you're happy. I backed Xenonauts. Long ago. I haven't even downloaded the game yet, because it's early access and in the case of Xenonauts I want it to be fairly far along before I try it. I threw money at it as soon as I saw it, however, because I wanted to make sure that (a) I gave it a vote of confidence, and (b ) I get a copy of it however far along they manage to get it. Minecraft I played the day I bought it, even though at the time it was pretty early days. Kerbal Space Program I haven't bought yet, and it's still alpha as far as I know, but it's getting to the point where I think it's good enough for me to throw money at. In my (very biased) opinion, early access is better than the alternatives in some respects and no worse in the rest.

That was a good episode! As someone who plays games, part of the appeal of early access is the appeal of crowd funding; knowing that I can vote with my wallet for something that might not be possible under traditional funding models, and knowing that by directly contributing to development I'm hopefully helping to insulate the project from some of the worse aspects of the traditional publisher/producer model. While the developers often do say "we're making the game you want us to make", they do have the latitude to treat design discussions with the backers as advisory. That latitude is often not there when the backer is a single entity like a publisher. I also see it as a more honest version of what's been going on for years; *everything* is early access these days, even if it claims not to be. When was the last time you bought a game that didn't get patched within a month of release? Unless it was on a DS/DSi/3DS cartridge, I'll bet you'll have to think about it before you can answer. For that matter, when was the last time you went more than a week without something on your phone or computer getting an update? When the original xbox first got a hard disk, a colleague of mine said "Ship and patch just came to consoles.". Someone pointed out that Microsoft had declared that there would be no ship and patch, you could only use the hard disk for saving games and caching, and the hard disk couldn't host executable content. My colleague said "Yeah, and that'll stick right up to the point where some important game ships with a crash bug, at which point suddenly it will turn out that executables are just data. Once they cross that line once...". So here we are. Everything is always in beta, it's just a question of how honest the developer of the software is being about it. With my developer hat on, early access means a lot of things, building an audience, getting the word out, the kind of extended testing and validating that only the biggest companies could afford before. The biggest thing early access gives, though, is the chance to try interesting designs that would never make it past a green light committee with a publisher or other large backer. It makes sense, really; for a large single backer like a publisher, there are all sorts of considerations; does the idea look like it can make more money than they spend on it, does it look like something they can market, is the PR group good with this kind of title, does it fit with their brand or will they need to consider making a new label for it, do they have an open shelf slot in walmart in the appropriate genre when the game is due to ship, what are the comparables... For individual players, the only considerations are "Do I have $20 I can live without?" and "Does it look like something I'd want to play?" and perhaps "Do these folks look like they'll be able to finish it?", though if the early access version actually runs and isn't dependent on a specific server you've got something even if the company implodes the moment you finish downloading the build. We're planning on launching something ourselves shortly, so I'm obviously not coming at this unbiased, but from the point of view of a small studio hoping to get a (we think) interesting strategy project off the ground, early access and Kickstarter are massive. Promising projects we've shelved because publishers would never back them are up for consideration again. Fundamentally, one of the biggest problems in this industry for a long time has been the customer relationship. In theory, the customer is the person who plays games, but for many years that hasn't really been true. As a developer, our customer is the publisher; they're paying the bills, they call the shots; if we don't do what they want, they can find someone who can. If we don't pitch something that fits their needs, they'll go elsewhere. So, who are the publisher's customers? Not the people playing games, unfortunately. Just as the developers are beholden to the desires of the publishers, the publishers are beholden to Walmart and the other major stores. Competition for shelf slots in Walmart is pretty fierce from what I understand. They are also somewhat beholden to the odd beast that is metacritic. The publishers are also fairly large, and are in the main public companies, so they're also mostly beholden to their shareholders. The people who play games are nearly irrelevant in this system; the developers actually making the games are several steps removed from the player, and any of those steps can withhold the player's money. Early access and crowdfunding short-circuits the whole broken system. Suddenly, the people playing the game are actually the developer's direct customer. There are no middlemen and no other sources of gravity pulling the developer away from the player. We're finally free again to make the games we think people will want to play, and to try crazy things that might or might not work, without knowing that it's doomed from the start because some gatekeeper between us and the player will refuse to let us try.

That's the gist of it, I think. If you think about (say) the Civilization series, can you think of any point in it past the first 10% of a game where you actually had to change strategy? Without some form of disruption, a strategy game can easily turn into choosing a track and then riding it to the end of the game. Sometimes that's what people want, and certainly it's no fun to be winning and then have the game reliably pull the rug out from under you. Once in a while, though, it would be nice if a game just tipped everything on its side and forced you (and everyone else in the game) to play under new rules. Something to exercise the "reacting to changing circumstances" muscle.

In the past I've found 1v1v1 more interesting than 2v2, but that could just be the games I played.

I think you got nailed by the shell redirect "<"; the podcast title is "We".