Microsoft to Bring 1st Party Titles to Game Preview Program
According to Shannon Loftis, Global Publishing general manager,
"First party will be using Game Preview for our games," Loftis tells us. "It's not 100 percent. It's very much developer choice, but it is definitely an option."
"We are curating that program," she says. "We're curating it very much with an eye for making sure that the games are high-quality games. A lot of the issues we've seen with the folks that tried this sort of service earlier have seen, are things that we've been able to learn from. There is a little bit of extrapolation that the gamer has to make in order to guess that the end product is good. So far, nothing has backfired as far as gamer reception, but we are being very cautious."
This kind of program could soon allow you to try out, or beta test first party titles before their initial release. Could this be a way of preventing another Unity style blunder, and allow developers to fine tune their games before initial release?
The program so far has been much like Steam's early access platform, allowing gamers to try games before their full release, which allows developers to bug test and improve upon aspects of the game... most of the time. It's also worth mentioning that early access is never free. Costs are still implemented and that money is always at risk of potentially going toward a project that may take years to finish its release.
Early access has had its share of blunders, with developers never coming back to finish the title, scrapping the game and starting fresh on numerous occasion and stringing along gamers to the point of mental fury. Could the same also apply to Microsoft's first party in the future?
It sure is an interesting concept.
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