LogFAQs > #977176120

Lokarin posted...

What I don't get it why people are complaing about the $90 early access fee... ... it's early access, you don't HAVE to get it.

Broadly, because it's manipulating FOMO, but there are some specific factors as well. For those that enjoy racing (which a lot of people do in MMOs), being a few days behind is an insurmountable handicap. For a story-centric game, waiting a few days to start can significantly increase the risk of being spoiled. For a community-based game, the community ends up split between early adopters and latecomers for the first little while. For a server-based game, starting early means players don't have their first experience soured by launch-day queues and crashes. For any game with quasi-competitive progression of any sort, being around to take advantage of day one bugs/oversights before they get patched out can give players a huge edge. Journalism-wise, the early access fee is basically mandatory for anyone that doesn't get a review copy, which effectively amounts to paywalling critical reviews to fluff early metacritic scores (since reviewers that are liable to properly criticize the game generally don't get sent review copies). Sure, you don't HAVE to get the game early, but there are plenty of reasons to be upset by having that be paywalled, both personally and as a general criticism of the industry.

Mostly, though, it's just naked, shameless money-grubbing, even more so than most scummy/predatory video game monetization. If they instead framed this as the game costing the premium price and launch and being discounted by $90 a week later, everybody would hate it, but that's exactly what they're doing. The game's done on the "early access" date. There's absolutely no reason everyone couldn't have it then, except that they want to charge for literally nothing on their end. Plenty of content creators will do similar things in the form of Patreon subscribers getting early access to content, but that's generally people who rely on those subscribers to make a living and want to incentivize subscriptions. When multi-billion dollar corporations do it because they're addicted to watching numbers go up meaninglessly, it's just plain greed.