10 Video Games To Blame For The Current State Of Games

5. Early Access - Minecraft

Love it or hate it, Minecraft is one of the most successful and iconic video games of the last decade, ultimately proving responsible for several gaming trends we now hold as normal - but one above all else.

First and foremost, Minecraft was a primitive example of the Early Access game, with developer Markus "Notch" Persson allowing players to pay 10 Euros to play an early version of the game while he continued to iterate on it.

The masterstroke was that players who paid for the early version would also receive the "final" build of the game for free, which was finally released in 2011.

Minecraft generated $33 million in sales during the Early Access period, and kickstarted a major trend of in-development titles offering access to early betas - and, eventually, the full game - in exchange for money upfront.

This led to the creation of Steam's Early Access program in 2013, and while there's no denying that many games have benefited from the exposure and cash injection they received in Early Access - Don't Starve, Kerbal Space Program, and PUBG, to name just a few - the system has also been open to rampant misuse and abuse.

It goes without saying that players are given no guarantee that they will end up with a satisfactory or even feature-complete game, while a November 2014 study of Steam's Early Access platform found that only 25% of titles in the program had actually made it to a final release.

Though Early Access has indeed helped many quality games make it to market and keep their developers financially afloat, there are many, many more inferior games which just couldn't deliver on their promises.

And because this business model ensures developers have already made fat stacks of cash before delivering a fit-for-purpose game, the incentive to actually release a top-tier product isn't quite so pressing.