It's 2024

year outside and the gaming industry has evolved so much, or maybe regressed? 

New possibilities

always mean bigger costs, and corporations need to seek new sources of income, that calls for price increasing, paid additional content, microtransactions, paid perks, etc... and early unlocks.

Earlier,

for example in 00s, games were not so aggressively monetized, you buy a game and you just own it and play it without additional costs.

But what happened?

Thanks to technologies, manufacturers now unlocked new ways to clean our wallets. 

But the purpose of this article is not to blame technologies or big corporations for corrupted sales ethics, but to underline problems of early unlock. 

Early unlock,

which is also known as early access, is one of the possibilities to monetize your game. This method is popular among big game companies. Today lots of AAA games have several pre-order options, for example a game can have standard, gold, ultimate and premium gold super ultimate edition: while the first ones have skins and perks included (I have never understood skins' purpose in single player games), the last one will probably include 2, 3 or 7 days of early unlock, which means if you pre-ordered premium gold super ultimate edition you can play several days earlier.

Talking about problems,

the main problem of early unlock is that players who got access early will share info, images, clips and etc. in social media, so this simply can be named spoilers. It is almost impossible to control this because information spreads across the digital world very fast. 

If this is a multiplayer game, I mean online game, here the problem will be in progression, players with early unlock will have some kind of head start. They will be able to boost their account by the time when other players join the game. And yes, there also will be spoilers.

One more problem will be that the game will have a smaller number of concurrent players at launch because players' flow will be split into two flows. This means that the game will be considered to be less popular than it could be. So, less popular = less copies sold = lower income.

It is just bad

towards fans, this type of monetization is kind of pumping money from ardent fans' wallets. Very ardent fans probably will want to play earlier, so they will be ready to spend 20 dollars more for the best edition of the game which includes early unlock. 

So, early unlock can be named as monetization of fanaticism. 

In conclusion,

I can say that early unlock monetization method maybe is a good source of income for companies, however for me it seems not fair enough for players who bought the standard edition of the game, in my opinion all players should have the same ability to enter the game on the day of release, especially if it is an online game. 

Well, the industry is evolving, and perhaps there will soon be even more terrible monetization methods. For example, payment for a match or paid reloading... - I don't want to give ideas, although it looks like Dragon's Dogma 2 has already come up with a couple of methods :)