Last week we reported on how Steam Early Access, giving customers the opportunity to buy into the development versions of games like Prison Architect and Arma 3, as well as granting them the full game upon release. You can read plenty elsewhere about the completed games that are available on Steam, but very little has been written about what you get if you pay up for early access. We’d like to change that and we’re going to take a close look at some of the more popular early access games over the next few weeks. This is a little bit of an experiment for us and we’re not entirely sure if it’s going to work, so we’d appreciate your feedback in the comments.
StarForge, currently in Steam’s best-seller’s list, is a good place to start. It’s a scifi game of sandbox construction across procedurally-generated worlds and its ambition is to let players “Dig an endless tunnel, fly out to the far reaches of space, and come back again.” That’s some pretty impressive scope and it helped to win StarForge over $135,000.
Now, for fifteen of your earth pounds, you can start StarForging right away, though naturally any alpha version of a game is going to be at least somewhat limited in what it can offer. As of it’s introduction to Steam, StarForge is at version 0.3.5. The important question to ask is: what do you get for your money?
