Yesterday, after several hours spent picking apart the 1.0 release of Project Motor Racing and recording my impressions for YouTube, the déjà vu was impossible to ignore. A beautifully produced promise on the store page, lofty language on the official site about replicating the “challenge and sensory overload” of professional racing, and then, on contact, a product that feels more like a paid beta than a confident, finished simulation. This is not an isolated misstep. It is a pattern that has spread through large parts of the games industry and, increasingly, into broader software markets: launch early, monetize hard, apologize later, and patch forward. The tension is that this playbook is financially rational in the short term and reputationally corrosive over the long term.

The early access model and its cousins did not begin as bad faith. Properly used, “pay to enter development” can be a genuine form of open innovation: a studio shares an unfinished build, invites the community into the design process, and uses both the revenue and the feedback to ship a better game. Research on early access describes how this model reduces financial pressure in a hit-driven industry and gives teams a way to validate risky ideas with real players instead of guessing in a vacuum. Stories of titles like Hades and Subnautica show how transparent communication, realistic roadmaps, and a polished core loop at first contact can turn early access into a trust multiplier rather than a liability. At its best, this is a partnership between creators and players that leads to better products and healthier studios.​

Somewhere along the line, however, the logic of “ship earlier” collided with the financial incentives of platform algorithms, investor expectations, and modern marketing. The same lean startup and MVP rhetoric that encouraged SaaS founders to put a small, focused product in front of real customers has been misinterpreted as license to ship bare-bones, low-quality releases and let users “fund the rest.” Commentators in both gaming and SaaS now describe a pattern in which early adopters are treated less as valued partners and more as disposable test subjects. They pay full or near-full price, they endure missing basics and broken edges, and their feedback is often about obvious gaps rather than nuanced improvements, which undermines the entire feedback loop. The MVP misconception that “viable” can include a poor core experience has migrated from B2B slide decks into mainstream entertainment, where emotional expectations are higher and patience is thinner.​

The cost of this shift shows up first as sentiment but eventually manifests as hard business impact. Analysis of early access and controversial launches points to a rising skepticism among players, who increasingly describe early access as a “racket” when games launch at premium price points yet clearly require another year of work. Communities around specific titles, including sim racers, call out trailers that oversell physics, AI, and content breadth compared with what is delivered on day one, and they quickly brand studios as repeat offenders when patterns of overpromise and underdelivery emerge. In enterprise software, similar criticism is now directed at MVP culture; practitioners argue that shipping something too thin and unreliable destroys trust before any useful learning can occur, and they advocate for “minimum lovable product” instead of “minimum viable product.” Across both domains, the unifying theme is that trust, once lost, is extraordinarily expensive to buy back, if it can be recovered at all.​

From a product leadership perspective, the ethical and practical question is not “should we ever launch early,” but “what do we owe our customers when we ask them to pay for unfinished work.” Emerging writing on ethics in game design and on responsible MVP practices offers a useful frame. Ethically serious teams treat early access, beta, and v1 labels not as marketing gloss but as explicit contracts. Transparency about development status and risks, honest scoping of what is and is not in the build, and fair pricing relative to completeness are all highlighted as baseline obligations rather than nice-to-haves. In parallel, responsible MVP guidelines in software stress that the “minimum” in MVP is the smallest surface area, not minimum quality, and that the core experience must be solid, reliable, and clearly oriented around a real problem. In other words, it is both possible and necessary to ship early without shipping something that fundamentally disrespects the customer’s time and money.​

This is where conscience and pragmatism align. A studio that positions a product as 1.0 at a premium price while knowing it lacks essential features, content, or stability is not simply taking a creative risk; it is making a deliberate decision to externalize product risk onto customers for immediate cash. Over time, that decision tightens the noose. As more players get burned, they wait for deep discounts, hold off on preorders, and ignore early access entirely, which erodes the very cash-flow benefits that tempted teams into this pattern in the first place. In SaaS and enterprise markets, a similar erosion happens when vendors consistently sell feature roadmaps that slip or MVPs that cannot support real workflows; buyers stop trusting roadmaps, renewals become harder, and the brand gets quietly blacklisted in informal peer networks. There is nothing “brilliant” about a strategy that monetizes today by making tomorrow’s launches harder and more expensive to sell.​

A more sane way forward starts with a reframing of what it means to ship early. Product organizations need to treat early adopters as the most valuable segment, not the easiest to exploit. In practice, that means delaying monetization or premium pricing until the core experience is truly compelling, even if ancillary features and breadth are still on the roadmap. It means using early access labels accurately and conservatively, with explicit success criteria for graduating to 1.0 that are grounded in customer outcomes rather than internal deadlines. Research on early access emphasizes that when players are genuinely involved in shaping the game, and when updates are regular, visible, and aligned with clear promises, satisfaction and loyalty increase rather than decay. Similarly, thoughtful MVP frameworks encourage teams to focus on an “earliest lovable” slice of value that can stand on its own, which both accelerates learning and preserves the brand.​

Finally, leaders have to model and institutionalize an ethical stance. That does not mean perfectionism, and it does not mean waiting until every last car, track, or feature is present. It means setting an internal bar for what the studio or company is willing to charge full price for, and refusing to cross that line for the sake of a financial quarter or a marketing window. It means communicating with the candor one would use in a direct conversation with a long-term customer, not the hyperbole of a teaser trailer. When software companies behave this way consistently, they earn something that algorithms and advertisements cannot manufacture: the benefit of the doubt. In a world saturated with hype and thin launches, the competitive advantage belongs to those who can still look their customers in the eye and say, with evidence, “this is worth your time today, and we will be here tomorrow.”​