I tend to suppress a howl of frustration and rage when confronted with Early Access games. There are some projects for which it makes sense—the modular, the ongoing, the otherwise un-fundable—but these are accompanied by people trying their luck flogging repackaged junk. GOG's new storefront for in-development games is aiming to solve that problem through uncompromising curation.
The store launches with five games of some repute: Starbound, Ashes of the Singularity, Project Zomboid, TerraTech and Curious Expedition. If you still feel let down by the experience, however, GOG is offering 14-day, no-questions-asked refunds.
Quite the most exciting feature—and I don't often use that phrase in connection with a proprietary launcher—is the ability to roll back patches in GOG Galaxy at your discretion. If an update borks the half-finished game, you can play an old version till it's knocked into shape.
"We've always been about offering a selection of noteworthy, carefully evaluated games. In short, we're about quality over quantity," managing director Piotr Karwowski told Gamasutra. "We look at many factors when making the final call, things like the development roadmap, what the game offers to players in its current state, the developer's track record or experience where applicable and so on."
Promising, no?
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