One lesson I see a lot of already successful game developers experiencing in the most painful ways (especially if their previous success was early access) Consumer trends in gaming are showing gamers have a MUCH lower patience / tolerance for buggy / unpolished experiences.

If I buy a $20 game and it's a little janky, I giggle and keep playing unless it's progress stoppingly bad. When I pay $70 for a game and it feels like it was barely playtested, yeah I get upset.

On the flipside if you play Star Citizen, you have a much *higher* tolerance for bugs and a lack of polish lmao

Just to add to this price point is a major contributor to this problem Early access of yester year you'd get heavily discounted and the price would go up closer to release. Now a lot of early access is sold at effectively release prices right from the start.

Seems like a lot of consumers don't have patience for indie games because of the reputation for unpolished experiences. It's a shame there's only a small niche at the moment who are willing to play indie games and approach them with patience.

It makes me sad, especially since I actually really like playing the scrappy unpolished buggy games. The game would still be very cool if real passion is put into it, and things like that make me feel like the developers are real in a way

Unsurprising, a barely playable mess of a concept isn't worth my limited time.

As they should. People have tolerated being sold a broken and unfinished product at full price for far too long. People should be singing the praises of games that release in a polished and complete state more, like FF7 Rebirth earlier this year.