Three quick items for today.

First, Battle Brothers has officially left Early Access and is now released, so we can add one more example to the list of successful uses of EA. I’ve written a ton about the game, and its good to see its on the second page of Steam’s top-seller list.

Second, I received a copy of Wartile, which is also in Early Access. The game is very, very early in development, and I have a lot of questions about how the final product might work (right now only 4 maps/missions are out, and in order to have a chance against the 3^rd, you have to beat the first and second repeatedly to ‘level up’, which feels very grindy), but I can see how eventually, this might turn into a fun and interesting title.

My main concern is someone randomly buying this off Steam right now, without any knowledge about the game or how EA works, might feel ripped off or cheated. Right now Wartile is more tech demo than game, and while that can be the intent of EA, you also run the risk of driving too many people away too early, and having there negative experience spread to others and ultimately hurt you.

Third, my Grim Dawn review experiment was interesting to watch. It got the expected initial burst of votes (including one negative vote that gave me a chuckle), and since that moved the review into the top spot, it continues to have votes trickle in, which was more-or-less my expectation. Now I’m just curious about it’s staying power. Compared to a lot of the other reviews, its more in-depth and detailed (many are 2-3 lines long in total), so one would hope that results in actually being more helpful for people looking at reviews, and that leads to continued up-votes. We shall see.

Also someone hit the ‘funny’ checkbox, because if there is one certainty on the internet, its that if you give someone a joke option, regardless of the topic, some people are going to click the joke checkbox.