There are few video game marketing terms more obscure than “early access.” What's even more painful is that it can refer to two very different scenarios: Sometimes it means putting a game in development on sale before it's finished, and other times it means providing access to a finished game early, usually as a bonus for pre-ordering the Deluxe Edition. Starfield offered several days of “early access” with the Premium Edition, for example.
Steam, the platform responsible for popularizing the first meaning of Early Access, has had enough. The final scenario, when a developer offers pre-launch access to a completed game, is now designated “Advanced Access.”
“Unlike Early Access, Advanced Access is not a unique model of game development, it is simply an opportunity to play a game before it is fully released on Steam,” The platform says.
Is it exactly the same term, but with the synonym for “early” swapped? Yes. But I don't have a better suggestion, so I'll take it. Please, EA, Ubisoft and everyone, do us a favor and cooperate with us. (Or better yet, stop it with that annoying pre-order incentive altogether!)
I'm sure someone at Valve shares my annoyance at the fickle meaning of “early access,” but the new distinction probably has nothing to do with that and more to do with a refund loophole. Apparently, when you got advanced access to a game in the past, your trial playtime didn't count toward the 2-hour refund window. Now that Steam has formalized Advanced Access, it is.
Steam Updated refund policy It still includes one exception to the two-hour rule, which is “beta testing,” which refers to special beta versions of games that developers can make available for a limited time. So, if you accept an invitation for a free playtest on Steam, it won't contribute to your playtime if you purchase the game later. But if you pre-purchase a game and then get advanced access to it, your playtime will decrease will A two-hour limit is used for automatic refund approval.
The potential for confusion still exists, because developers sometimes call advanced access periods beta periods, even if no one thinks it's reasonable to claim that you're “beta testing” a game a couple of days before it's widely released. But he progressed.
Steam's new functionality also allows players to write user reviews during the advanced access period. In the past, you would sometimes see games with thousands of concurrent players but no reviews, because they weren't technically “finished” yet. (I still object to the idea that a game won't be “released” if you can pay the Deluxe Edition fee to play it, but that would mean rejecting the idea of ”advanced access” entirely, and we'd be here all day if I tried to fully work through that thought.)
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