(Editor’s Note: As I was gearing up to publish this, the news broke that Blazing Griffin is pushing the release date back to deal with the exact issue that this article covers.)
The Ship Remastered is set to go into Early Access on Monday, and while most developers do their best to get a game in working order before putting it out to the public, Blazing Griffin will be taking a new approach of making the game unplayable for most customers. You see, when the game does go live on Monday, it will do so with neither online play nor bots, meaning if you have no one to play with on a LAN, you have no reason to purchase the game, at least not at first. Assuming all goes according to plan, and the developer keeps up with its schedule, online play will hit the game after a few weeks.
There is little doubt in my mind that launching a game into Early Access with the most important function not yet implemented is going to do some early and likely irreparable damage to Blazing Griffin’s status, between the bevvy of negative reviews that will no doubt pop up to the number of people who will purchase and then very quickly apply for a refund, after giving said negative review. Regardless of Blazing Griffin’s reasons for launching this early, it is pretty irrefutable that early negative impressions can outright kill a game in early access, and in a business format that already has a negative public image, can kill the funding for a game before it even has a chance to succeed.
What more, the very real concern of killing off interest in the game with a misstep right out of the gate is something that Blazing Griffin should be well acquainted with, having tried and failed to grab community interest in a The Ship game just a few years ago. Back in 2012, BG attempted a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of merely £128,000 to create The Ship: Full Steam Ahead. The game just broke eighteen grand from about six hundred people. The Ship on Source only retains its tiny community because you can’t walk two feet without tripping over ten free copies of the game.
As a game that will function primarily over online multiplayer, The Ship absolutely relies on a healthy, active community in order to remain viable in the market, and once people start jumping ship (no pun intended), the population effect tends to snowball. Yes, Blazing Griffin stands to obtain some useful information from launching in Early Access with just LAN, but they also stand to lose a lot more in the long run from the people who will either see the lack of online and put the game on their ignore list, or those who buy the game and refund it within the two week window because online hasn’t been added yet, only to never look back.
I say this not to trash The Ship and Blazing Griffin, but as a long time fan of the series that would like to see its next iteration not fall into the same pit as its predecessor: A dead community leading to a defunct developer, and that doesn’t help anyone.
MMO Fallout 