14 DAY TRIAL // Brian Fargo, the head of InXile Entertainment, has talked a bit about the success of Wasteland 2 on the Steam Early Access program and even dubbed Valve the savior of PC gaming, thanks to the huge paradigm shift introduced with Steam many years ago.
Wasteland 2 is the successor to the cult classic post-apocalyptic role-playing game released many years ago. Creator Brian Fargo has already received a lot of money from fans after a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, and now the game is available in an alpha stage for the PC via the Steam Early Access program.
According to Fargo, who talked with Eurogamer, the amount of work the Valve developers have done for the PC gaming scene is phenomenal, especially in the early days when it was quite hard to get a game to players without working with publishers and various other companies.
"They're the saviors of the PC as far as I'm concerned," Fargo said. "They've been great. You think about where we all were, kind of in the dark ages, when there was nothing. There was just flash. There was no digital distribution. They've opened up a way to get directly to the audience in a way that isn't politicized, or forces us to do exclusives or all the other things the console guys do."
Fargo has revealed that until recently, getting a game on consoles meant jumping through a lot of hoops and meeting some baffling requirements, like on the Xbox 360.
"It used to be with Xbox, just until very recently, you couldn't have an Xbox Live Arcade publishing license unless you had a retail product. What did that have to do with anything? Valve has all this power but they don't wield it. They let us all work in an open system. So for that I can't say enough good things about them."
Fargo has also discussed a bit the Steam Early Access program, saying that, for some developers, it's actually crucial to achieve some degree of success in order to have enough money to finish development.
"That puts it into a different category and that gets very scary. If you buy Wasteland 2 Early Access you're going to get the game. We're going to finish it. That might not always be the case with everyone. So I expect that, again like Kickstarter, that people are going to further refine and scrutinize what it is they're willing to spend money on early on."
Wasteland 2 is set to debut this year on PC.