The successfully Kickstarted highly destructive RTS game, Planetary Annihilation, has managed to head into early alpha testing. The game is probably the most badass RTS title coming to the market and Uber Entertainment has set a pretty steep price to ensure that only worthy gamers have access to the pre-alpha.
As explained on the official Steam page...
Our pricing for this stage of early access was determined by our Kickstarter. The stages of our early access for ALL users, which was determined during our Kickstarter, is:June through August: $90 for early alpha access, during the time where we're still locking down features and making tweaks to the flow of the game.September through November: $60 for beta access. The game will be much more complete at this time,
I imagine the high price will easily detour gamers from buying into the early pre-alpha access, and you're going to hate me for saying but I think they're doing the right thing.
Early pre-alpha access is not meant to be played and enjoyed like a typical game, it's meant to find and iron out bugs. For RTS games finding and fixing bugs is a lot different than a typical shooter and requires a different kind of care and balance since unit and strategic balancing is what will make or break your game.
Setting the price of entry high for this phase of testing is reasonable given that only die-hard RTS fans will be willing to pay such an exorbitant price, but at the same time it ensures that no one will buy into the alpha to troll, complain or generally become a nuisance, sort of like Steam Greenlight before the $100 entry fee.
On the upside, at least the beta will be a lot more reasonable...though, I think $60 is still pretty high. Nevertheless, Planetary Annihilation is one of the most ambitious RTS games ever made and takes the scope of strategic warfare to whole new heights (literally).
I can't wait to see how this game fares on the open market when it finishes all the testing phases because it would be pretty rad to see Planetary Annihilation set the bar for what an RTS game should be, and maybe even get a few more companies mimicking the style just the way they did with Total Annihilation.
You can learn more about the game by paying a visit to the official website.
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