This problems ocurs me for some time. The clear problem is, the industry will publish everything people will buy. And this is probably the best example of how stupid this works.
Capcom publishs a unfinished game and fans buy it, defend it. This signals to Capcom "Hey, people buy our product anyway, so why should weworry in the future? Let's cut even more from it.". There is no prrof that capcom will ever deliver this features that the game lacks (but I think they will, the problem is, they shouldn't have delivered the game in the first place when it's not finished).
If you buy stuff from people, you signal them, that you like it the way it is. and developers/publishers, in particular big AAA publishers, are lazy as hell. They will do as much as they have to but not more if they don't profit from it. o people buy it without Arcade Mode? Let's just cut it out entirely. Hell, know what? Let's CHARGE in the future for it as extra DLC.
This whole industry suffers from this thinking more and more and developers introduce new mehods to sell unfinished games and sell the content you need to play the whole experience as extra.
Either if it are special, deluxe editions of a game (for example Dungeon of the endless that offers an entire segment of the game as deluxe package), DLC content ("Day one DLC") or episodic games.
Charging for extra content is a small line between greed and honest development. One of the most sttupid exampley I came ever across is Darkout. I don't own the game, so keep in mind I can only tell that much what I found out by reading news (from the developers, from third parties).
The game started, like many of it's kind as an early access sandbox game but they promised a deep lore and story mode to differetiate from similiar games (like for example Starbound,w hich was also on EA at that time). And, again like many of it's relatives, it also started to get problems with fundings. development took too long, the developers calculated, that EA will fund the game instead of looking for other ways to fund it beforehand (what you should do in EA to begin with), so they faced the truth that they cannot continue development. So what plan do they have? They thought about Kickstarter but the lead developer said int the news the following:
"There have been suggestions on multiple occasions that we should start a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to finish the project, and we’ve actually thought about doing something like that for a long time. What holds us back is the fact that we don’t want to just ask for more money for Darkout, which you already own and paid for, and we don’t have any marketing budget at all to help spread the word beyond our current fanbase."
So in other words: He does not want to charge his customers again for a game that they bought already because they bougth it with the intention of having a finished product in the end.
HOWEVEr he clearly has soemthign else in mind: Sell the rest of the game as sperate DLC. This means the story content, additional stuff (items, resources, enemies, whatever there is in this game) and the ending of the game itself. So he says on the one side, he doe not want to charge for the game again but still charges for future stuff that has to be in the game but isn't. Genius.
To make it clear, what his really intention is: Kickstarter is a one-time funding, you present soemthign, you get your funding, when the funding time is over you have that much money and nothing more. And you HAVE to finish the game with what you get from there, nothing more. So he has to rely on what he gets from there or if he gets everything he needs to begin with. And if he screws up again (which is likely, he didn't do it right the first time) with the calculations, he has to stop the game development a second time and begging for a second time and... well, you know where this leads.. So how do you guarantee a ongoing funding that even exceeds after the game has been finished? DLC. Like all greedy developers, when you split the game in multiple parts, sell them as DLC, you can charge more for what is actually one finished product. This has nothuing to do with funding to begin with, this is clearly greed at it's peak.
And to make the whole scene more bizarre, he wrote also that the team will now start a SECOND game with what is left from the money, a smaller one that they can finish, that will fund the FIRST game. I think I don't have to mention, said second game never came out.
I was inetrested in this game while it was in EA but for some reason I didn't buy it back then.Looking now at it I'm glad. This is soem really messed up stuff and you have to feel really bitter about it.
The other thing I want to mention is Starforge: It was the typical sandbox survival 3D game that flood Steam (because it's popular or at least it used to be and now people are annoyed by it but developers still start their own versions of the same crap over and over).
Starforge looked promising, it had some unique features. It started with a Fort Defense mode that is actually a tower defense mode, you build turrets, enemies arrive in waves and you have to defend your fort. Thsi was really early in development but I worked more or less. There was also planned a deep RPG gameplay for the game. You could train different attributes and improve your char, so you can collect faster resources or deal more damage etc. They implemented a prototype of that as well and it worked.
You see, the key is, they made a lot of prototypes but never finished anything. And then funding ceased. And they had to fire a lot from their big staff (people say the developers had a too big staff for an indie newcomer). Graphic developers, that worked for them, took their models and textures with them, when they left, because Code Hatch was too dumb to cover this in the contracts. In the end the game was released in an unfinished state, a lot of the features mentioned above (the prototypes) were removed entirely because the developers saw it easier to remove them instead of working on them. we had to live with placeholder graphics and a buggy mess. The screenshots ot the front page are mostly fake (or at least they are from astate where the game didn't look like the mess it is now) but since big parts of the game were taken away, the game looks nothing like what you see there. The fans were disappointed, more so because Code Hatch said they won't develop at the game anymore unless it suddenly would have a big spike in the sales (which was impossible because of the state of the game).
They than started a new project. it was entirely the same thing with a new look. They changed the space theme to medieval one but in it's core it was the same: Sandbox in Early access. And again, sometime in the development, money got low, game was labeled "finished" and released in a messy state.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. people who bougth the second game deserve no better, it was clear fromt he start that Code Hatch tried the same scam again. And got awqay with it again. Whatever they are planning now, they don't get a hold in the gaming industry anymore, people remember such terrible moments.
The problem is, such thinking is not the exception, it happens all the time and currently Steam is flooded with such titles and developers who just want a piece of the cake and disappear when they got it. And as logn as people continue to support this crap, they will get away with it. If other developers see, that other got away with it, they will follow the example. And developers that are truly dedicated toward their projects, like Arce games, will go under in this flood, just because people are ignorant and by all the shit they get served. And then they cry "scam!" and want a refund. these people don't deserve it better. If they blindly follow them, they have to face that it's their own fault. I followed Starforge, I won't make the mistake twice. I totally ignored their second project when it started because I KNEW they woudl scam the people again. And I was right.
