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Comment by Paul_S | Hacker News Reader

It's a fun game but please, at some point you have to release and stop pretending it's alpha to avoid any responsibility. It is now not unusual to buy an "alpha" release of a game, play for a few years, shelve it and move on and then notice 5 years later that the final release has shipped. I can't be the only person who finds this silly.

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Factorio EA is like Kerbal Space Program used to be: it's a completely viable and fun game, but not feature complete. They have a vision for what they want the release to be like, and they're making progress toward that.

I disagree that it's a way to shift responsibility. The devs are responsive and the game is very stable. I can't tell you the number of times I've watched a bit of an older let's play series and some minor complaint or wish has since been addressed.

Many games are like that, but not Factorio. So, it just comes down to semantics and what EA means, vs. what perhaps it should be.

The "alpha" release vs. "final product" in game development is an artifact of the shift in the way software is developed in general. Even in traditional big biz software development, instead of a waterfall process with a quarterly release, you have much more frequent releases and much more incremental process with active user feedback built in to the cycle. All you're seeing is this process moved to game development and relabeled with a marketing term that's acceptable to consumers.

Where does it say that? All I see is that it is on Steam, they started developing in 2012, and that they call it "very stable". I don't see "alpha" anywhere.

The current version on their website is 0.12.26 (alpha).

On the Steam store page it's listed as "Early Access," which is the alpha/beta branding loophole that Steam uses.

Yeah like 60% of the indie games I played have barely made it to better before I was done with them. But this kind of thing is very typical for indie games. There are also a lot of open source games that people play for a decade but it's "still" 0.1.x.

I can forgive them since that often means that they focus on realising their big dream instead of making a big buck out of half their dream. Imho not good for them but quite good for me, since I get to play deeper games.

How would you call it? If you call it "released" things like "story not finished", "might want to do large changes later" become harder to accept. (?)

(On the other hand Minecraft released one day, but is still changing quite a lot. I don't know what a good label for "well-playable, but evolving" is... )

There are plenty of examples of abuses/attempts at absolution in the current Early Access ecosystem, without question.

Factorio is not one of them, IMO.

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