Open world survival games are a thing that has recently, over the past few years, exploded in popularity and many developers/publishers are jumping in to get a part of the pie. This craze began with a little 56MB voxel based game called Minecraft. The Beta began for 10$ buy in to test, a bit later when it released it upped its price to 30$. Then the craze continued with a mod for an obscure (at the time) military simulator called ArmAII; DayZ Mod. The mod was free (as long as you bought the base game ArmAII for 20$ (5$ with steam sales) ) and always in development, adding features with every patch. Vehicles, Wildlife, Tents, Base Construction and so on. It became the new hard core survival game. This is when everything started to go downhill.
Over the past 5 years we started to see the rise of the hard core survival genre. The problem is not the variety, in fact this is a good thing, it creates healthy market competition. The problem is that there are at least a dozen survival games and only but 2 are finished products. the first obvious one is from Microsoft (Mojang): Minecraft and the second is from Ubisoft: Zombi. (before you ask, yes it is plagued by UPlay).
To make things worse is that all these games are BUY TO TEST, with a promise of a copy of the game when it's released. Minecraft was buy to play and was totally worth it for 10$ specially since the game is out and now worth 30$; so what is the problem? These new Survival games are mostly 20$ or more and are in semi playable state filled with bugs and crashes, sometimes making the game unplayable. Here is a quick list of all Survival Games with their approximate prices (CAD/USD) for sure there are more, I just placed the best known but there are dozen more survival games
RELEASED
ZOMBI - 25$ (single player)
Minecraft - 30$
EARLY ACCESS (Multiplayer)
DayZ Standalone - 40$
Ark: Survival Evolved - 30$
Rust - 20$
7 Days to Die - 30$
Miscreated - 20$
Life is Feudal - 45$
Planet Explorers - 20$
Nether - 10$
Infestation: Survival Stories (aka WarZ) - 10$
Savage Lands - 20$
H1Z1 - 20$ (F2P on release)
EARLY ACCESS (Singleplayer)
Stranded Deep - 15$
The Forest - 15$
The Long Dark - 15$
These games are no where near being complete and some like Nether or Infestation, We haven't heard or patched anything on steam from the devs since February (That's 8 months ago from the time stamp of this blog). DayZ which is a zombie survival games, currently doesn't have any zombies. Ark's latest patch crashes the game if you use ladders. Some of you might say: Its a beta/alpha, bugs are expected. Sure, and some will remain in beta/alpha for ever. "foreverbeta games" DayZ has been in beta for almost 2 years now. Zombies not working, and not in game is not acceptable time line. H1Z1 survival is so boring and incomplete that most players are just playing BattleRoyale mode. which is a deathmatch/team deathmatch. even the devs have been focussing on their arena pvp deathmatches more than survival. If I want to play deathmatch games, there is CS:Go or CS: Source (among a gigantic pool of shooters)
I am sure that 1/2 these games will just die out and the devs/publishers will simply walk away with all the Early Access money they got. Also worth mentioning. if you stay in beta too long the hype will just die down and when you release the game it will attract only a few players (if any)
I thought F2P was the bane of gaming. but at least you get something for your money. be it a fancy digital dress/armor, or bag space/ bank tabs. but Early Access has topped this. EA is probably the new EVIL in gaming. You are forced to Pay to Play, but you get an incomplete game, sometimes even unplayable and sometimes they never even get finished and get abandoned.
