Over the last 10 or so years, programs like Steam Greenlight and Early Access have dramatically altered the face of game publishing. Steam Greenlight obviously got pushed to the side in favour of a “anyone can publish anything they want whenever they want” model but the fundamental idea of “anyone can be an indie dev” only found itself reinforced. Simultaneously, the AAA game sphere found its focus shifting towards Games as a Service (or the less charitable GaaS monicker).

The initial concept of GaaS is simple: continuously add content to a game after its release to maintain and regular and consistent cash flow from microtransactions. This could be seen as a subscription model with extra steps and it’s often masquerading as not that predatory of a practice by having gameplay content be free whilst cosmetics are not (but then being tied to the predatory FOMO battle-passes or gambling loot-boxes, although monetisation strategies are not the point here). As an added bonus for the AAA publishers, GaaS also meant that players had to either repeatedly come back to their game or continuously play it without stopping, thus erasing competition for the time of players with other games.

However, the benefits players reap from this are a lot more difficult to point out. Whilst the GaaS practice was confined to multiplayer games there was an argument to be made in its favour as it allowed the game to stay alive and supported for longer than it would otherwise. One just needs to look at League of Legends and think about how long that game would have been around if Riot had not continuously improved the game whilst also releasing numerous skins to fund these improvements. Unfortunately, GaaS wasn’t only applied to multiplayer games, Paradox games are infamous for releasing bare-bone games whose development continues for upwards of a full decade slowly adding paid gameplay content (some of which is considered critical) along with free updates which also include several direly needed changes and additions. To make matters worse GaaS has gotten to the indie market and whilst it’s definition has changed to simply be “continuously add content to a game after its release” without the idea of a continuous cash-flow from microtransactions it raises an important question: when is the best time to buy and play the game?

Your gut response might be “when the game hits 1.0” but that simply isn’t true anymore. There is the obvious issue of some games simply refusing to leave early access as an excuse for a never ending flow of new features like Project Zomboid or until recently 7 Days to Die, fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with just filtering out early access titles until they get their full release but is it acceptable to ask people to wait sometimes up to 10 years? Additionally, whilst games in early access have a very understandable roadmap of features they want to add before 1.0, almost every game nowadays comes with an additional roadmap as soon as the game exits early access. It is great in some ways to see the passion and drive of some devs for the games they created that even after years of early access development, they still want to expand on it past its release, but people also have a limited amount of time.

On Reddit there is a community called “patientgamers” which revolves around the idea of waiting for a game to have fully completed its development cycle before purchasing and playing it. Not only do they get to avoid buggy releases, they also get all of the content at once often bundled in a “gold” or “game of the year” edition at a discounted price. It’s a good time-respecting and budget-savvy way of getting the best out of games and works really well for singleplayer games with a finite development cycle like Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3 or Dragon Age Origins. It’s however a lot more difficult to apply this philosophy to singleplayer games that just won’t stop growing. When is the best time to play games like No Man’s Sky, Stardew Valley or Against The Storm? They are all games that despite having had full releases are still being actively worked on with quite regular free updates which add significant amounts of content when they don’t entirely rebalance and rework the way the game fundamentally works in some ways. They all offer a complete experience out of the box but many issues one might have with the game are likely going to be fixed in a couple months (or years) with another update so is it worth playing now?

Looking at No Man’s Sky as the prime example, one of my bigger complaints was that the procedural generation of planets was lacklustre something I thought would never be fixed because of the scale of changes needed to make this happen. Yet, a few weeks ago an update was pushed completely revamping world generation; time to jump back in? No because this is “part 1” of this update and the other part is going to come out in a few indeterminate months. Should I jump in after that update? Well I still have issues with some aspects of the gameplay so if they can patch and change something as complicated as world generation then it’s likely they’ll eventually add a more interesting questing system, right? So I might as well wait again but for how long? No Man’s Sky is 8 years old now and there is virtually no sign of the devs calling the game feature complete. When is ever going to be the best time to play this game? The answer is probably “never”, or less dramatically, “when I have long moved past having interest in the game”. It sucks because there is a world where I enjoy games like No Man’s Sky or Stardew Valley, there’s even this world right now where I’m enjoying Against The Storm but it takes a lot of mental wrestling to convince myself that I’m not locking myself out of revisiting the game later after dozens of patches improving it when I’ll already be long burnt out from it.

There are still games out there obviously that use much easier to follow development cycles like Factorio which is only adding a DLC years after its full release which has since only received minor bugfixing patches instead of randomly spaced massive feature updates but these games are too rare, ironically, especially in the indie scene which has taken feature creep to heart.