The trick is to realise that thanks to the rise of "early access" in indie games, "alpha" means release, but released absolved of any sort of commitment to cont

The trick is to realise that thanks to the rise of "early access" in indie games, "alpha" means release, but released absolved of any sort of commitment to continue to develop the game or ship quality software. Final "release" versions are often really "end of life" _final_ versions with no future expansion. It's not to say that many indie (and not-indie) devs produce good games under this model, it's just there's been a huge shift in what players and developers expect from each other, as well as how they market it. Similar parallels can also be drawn to the pre-paid kickstarter systems which were originally intended to help pay for upfront costs like manufacturing, but are now really used as risk-management tools to help ensure a certain number of sales before a project starts in earnest. There's no reason Peter Molyneux should need to ask players to pre-fund a game [1] of unknown quality and even scope, for example. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godus