Steam closes refund policy loophole, finally comes up with a name for the thing where you can play a game early if you pre-order
Few video game marketing terms are more ambiguous than “early access.” The painful part is that this can refer to two very different scenarios: sometimes it means putting a game in development on sale before it’s finished, and other times it means offering early access to a completed game, usually as a deluxe edition pre-order bonus. Starfield, for example, offered several days of “early access” with its Premium edition.
Steam, the platform responsible for popularizing the original meaning of early access, has had enough. It now refers to the latter scenario, when a developer offers pre-launch access to a completed game, as “Advanced Access”.
“Unlike Early Access, Advanced Access is not a single model for developing a game, it is simply an opportunity to play a game before its full release on Steam,” specifies the platform.
Is it exactly the same term, but with a synonym for “early” replaced? Yes. But I don’t have a better suggestion, so I’ll take it. Please, EA, Ubisoft and everyone else, do us a favor and play the game. (Or, better yet, stop this altogether with this annoying pre-order incentive!)
I’m sure someone at Valve shares my irritation at the fluctuating meaning of “early access,” but the new distinction probably has less to do with that, and more to do with a refund loophole. Apparently, when you had advanced access to a game in the past, your pre-release playtime didn’t count toward the two-hour refund window. Now that Steam has made Advanced Access official, it is.
Steam’s updated refund policy still includes an exception to the two-hour rule, “beta testing,” which refers to special beta versions of games that developers can make available for a limited time. So if you accept an invitation to a free playtest on Steam, it won’t contribute to your playtime if you purchase the game later. But if you pre-purchase a game and then get advanced access to it, your play time will count towards the two-hour limit for automatic reimbursement approval.
The potential for confusion still exists, because sometimes developers call advanced access periods beta periods, although no one thinks it’s reasonable to claim that you’re “beta testing” a game two days before its release at large scale. But it’s progress.
The new Steam feature also allows players to write user reviews during the Advanced Access period. In the past, you would sometimes see games with thousands of concurrent players but no reviews because they weren’t technically “released” yet. (I still object to the idea that a game isn’t “released” if you can afford the deluxe edition fee to play it, but that means completely rejecting the idea of ”access” advanced”, and we would be here all day if I tried to work fully on this thought.)
News Source : www.pcgamer.com
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