[2022] Why is this game still in Alpha 8 years later?

Originally posted by Schmiddy: You guys get mad and insult me for asking a genuine question.

Maybe the devs/mods should pin a post to actually address the issue instead of leaving half the community curious and the rest to flame and attack the former.

To put it simply for the "smoothbrains" in the thread: eat ♥♥♥♥. thanks.

It's not like we haven't tried pinning plenty of stuff... Still, 95+% of the time, People just make their posts without actually reading any of it.

Further, The more pins there are, the less likely people are to bother looking through them to begin with. Searching for keywords of your topic is functionally the same thing- But very few use the search feature either.


Why? Because it's quicker, and takes less effort to just post their question, and it gets the answer delivered to their feet in a tidy package instead of having to sift through the pins or search results themselves.


With that said, The answer to your question, summarized, is "Because game development takes a long time. And 7DTD specifically began it's public foray into the wider world with literally the first working version ever, Alpha 1, Build 1- We've been witness to it's development from the moment go."

Meanwhile, basically every other company and game developer doesn't let you even get wind of their game until it's 95% done and they launch a playable demo at something like E3 or make a trailer.

The average development time for games these days is 5+ years. That's the average set by titanic companies like EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, etc. Starcraft II for example was 7+ years of development- By Blizzard, a well established company at that time, while TFP basically only just formed at the start of 7DTD's development.

The difference is that, like most games, you didn't get to hear about SC2 until it was largely done, and didn't get to play until it was basically done just missing some polish. This heavily skews public perception into thinking game development takes a lot less time than it actually does. Using SC2 as a further example, SC2 had been in development for 4-5~ years before it was even announced publicly, and then it laid quietly for several more years before the first beta and eventually release. So what does the public see there? They see a 2~ year development cycle, because that's the superficial layer of it on top and most don't bother looking into the actual time required. As far as the general public sees, development begins at the announcement, and ends at release.

There are absolutely outliers in both directions. There are games that get finished in a year, there are games that get finished in 15. But the average is 5~+, mostly set by titans of the industry.


7DTD is unique even among EA games, as most EA games enter EA having already had a fair amount of development time behind them, while 7DTD as mentioned above, began EA with Alpha 1, Build 1. Something basically no developer does- Because the general public just doesn't get how long development actually takes.

TFP were admittedly a bit overambitious, they thought they'd be done a lot sooner despite the large dream they had. And they were wrong. But they had promised to make the game available for kickstarter backers to play the moment they had a working mockup- and the rest is history.. And in the end, Considering they started with 4 people, being finished with an ambitious game within 10 years is pretty par for the course.

Edit: And, what seemed 'mostly done' to you was anything but. TFP have a list of features to meet from the kickstarter and they're going to keep developing the game to meet that promised list of features; Instead of doing what most other companies do which is cut corners and cut content to meet an arbitrary deadline and launch a 'finished' game, only to sell you back a bunch of that cut content later as DLC.. Or that content just never sees the light of day, which is unfortunate in it's own ways.