Before Steam came along we were ”kind of in the dark ages,” with only Flash letting developers try stuff out and directly engage gamers, but now it’s opened up.
Fargo’s Wasteland 2 was successfully funded on Kickstarter and today enjoys a strong presence through the Steam Early Access program, which funds many titles today.
”They’re the saviours of the PC as far as I’m concerned,” inXile boss Brian Fargo told Eurogamer.
”They’ve been great. You think about where we all were, kind of in the dark ages, when there was nothing. There was just flash. There was no digital distribution. They’ve opened up a way to get directly to the audience in a way that isn’t politicised, or forces us to do exclusives or all the other things the console guys do.”
The console bad big guys Microsoft and Sony ”put all sorts of guns to our head”, he said.
”It used to be with Xbox, just until very recently, you couldn’t have an Xbox Live Arcade publishing license unless you had a retail product. What did that have to do with anything? Valve has all this power but they don’t wield it. They let us all work in an open system. So for that I can’t say enough good things about them.”
Fargo feels Early Access is improving as time goes on as the process refines, with gamers adapting to this new way of both funding a game and getting to play it far earlier than they otherwise would.
”I have VUDU here,” he said. ”It’s like Netflix except you pay for everything, but it’s all first run movies. When they come out on Blu-ray they’re on VUDU at the same time. The first week you can only buy it. The second week you can rent it. Well I can’t tell you how many movies I’ve bought I will never watch again because I want to play it right then. I think there’s a lot that drives that. That concept of being impatient and willing to pay for it, that’s not going to go away.”
It’s going to keep refining itself, he says, as its one thing to pay for a game that’s adequately funded and marching toward a release, but it’s another for people to throw money at something that could never happen.
”That puts it into a different category and that gets very scary,” said Fargo. ”If you buy Wasteland 2 Early Access you’re going to get the game. We’re going to finish it. That might not always be the case with everyone. So I expect that, again like Kickstarter, that people are going to further refine and scrutinise what it is they’re willing to spend money on early on.”
Wasteland 2 received a significant update almost two weeks ago with a whole new area added, a large balance pass on weapons, along with many optimisations and fixes. Wasteland 2 is available on Steam Early Access for £34.99.