For me this hype passed very fast. I now never buy alpha, beta, pre-pre-early-alpha-candidates-please-buy-me-I-promise-it-will-be-good, preorders, 0day dlcs, early accesses etc.
I play lots of old games through GoG, I might as well skip all the buggy incomplete "games" and wait until they either fail or live. My backlog is so huge that there is no need now to run for next hyped game.
I'm in the same bucket, Alpha games are worthless. Some have been in alpha so long that you see them in sales. I wish there was a filter on Steam to block them.
Edit: Case in point - I just opened my email and saw: "Project Update #89: Planetary Annihilation Now $29.99". It's drifted all the way down to $30 from $90 in several stages, and still isn't 'finished'.
It is a false alpha. Twenty years ago, the "alpha" of today would be the release of yesteryear. If your game shipped with bugs, well, I guess its buggy. Because its never getting patched or fixed.
The fact you can endlessly patch your game remotely forever automatically is a blessing and a curse. It means many games continue to improve over time, while also meaning many games enter the market in shitty conditions and alpha state with a promise to see them improve over time.
In reality, I think it is more that it isn't a sensible business model to self-finance development, spend the years it takes to make a competitive product in the current market (versus Doom or Wolf3d being made in months) and then pray the sales are enough to not only cover the expenses of that game but fund enough of the next title to last to its release.
Its too unpredictable. Instead, people like continuous income. Alpha early, release perks, gating the community, and your release notes become your advertising. New players are attracted as you improve the game over time. And there are benefits - you can find out early on what mechanical systems don't work, and what features not to pursue because their early releases are rejected by the community. You can do Agile games rather than Waterfall ones.
Well, it's more beta than alpha I agree, but it's still not 'released'. The terminology is wrong, but the end result is the same - I backed Planetary Annihilation on kickstarter, and left it, then tried it a few months ago. It definitely wasn't in a finished state, regardless of final polish.
The problem with the 'alpha' release system is that it's causing a lot of blowback. A lot of users hate it. This system sounds good on paper, but it's not working very well, as far as I can see - it feels like for the most part it merely delays failure of a product that wasn't going to succeed, rather than create a bunch of things that we wouldn't otherwise have had access to. There is a lot of alpha release games out there. Planetary Annihilation in particular is a weird one, because the dev team had heavy experience in dev and also business, and got kickstarted way, way above their asking budget... yet despite being an unfinished game for most of the past two years, it's been showing up in marketing chaff for much of that.
I'm rambling a bit now, I guess, but my take-home point is that for me personally, the advent of alpha-funded games has not improved my experience, and has actively detracted from it. The honeymoon period is over, and it's now being exposed more and more as what it is - nothing like a preorder (yes, yes, no-one ever said it was... but it's still the subliminal marketing message), just an investment with a payoff, and given the number of failures, it's a bad investment. It moves more risk from the business to the consumers, but there are too many finished, worthy games to bother with taking that risk anyway.
