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.
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.