Well that was a good read, my personal view point is that, developers seemingly either don't know or don't understand which way the PC gaming platform is going, the sad fact is technology innovation is out running software innovation, which basically leads to developers having more toys to play round with than they have ideas.
This is nothing new to pc gamers and dev's though, the pc has always struggled in terms of what is viable and what isn't as you may start a project today and by the time the development cycle is completed half of your new shiny features are old news, one reason consoles have always been more of a focus, because consoles have a set non variable selection of hardware that very rarely changes, where as pc's you must take into account many thousands of configurations. One reason i always laugh when people complain about a dev not testing enough etc, sometimes it comes down to what is practical, in order for any pc game to run on every combination of hardware they would have to test the beta on ever single persons computer...
Which now brings me to these early access games, while as stated in the review there are pro's to this, there are also serious limitations, for one thing some time devs don't have either the knowledge or manpower to back up submitted bug reports, so while some of these 2 man indie companies say they can make a game, which they probably can, there knowledge of hardware may be somewhat lacking which then causes problems down the line when trying to iron out bugs. Good example of that is Dayz, there team listens but they have not got a clue what to do with the information.
This links in with another issue of post release optimization, a game that supposedly leaves is dev cycle and becomes release version which is then optimized on a very limited hardware spectrum.
The idea of paying for early access in my opinion is absurd, i think they only model which can work is releasing these early access as demos, if we take money as being the motivation behind making a game and lets be honest anyone who says they make a game just for pure passion is lying, they once you have X amount of money where is the motivation ?
That my friends is the fundamental flaw with the early access idea, once the cash is there, there is no longer an incentive to keep up the work and quality.
Sadly many people do not think like this and worse yet many more will gladly pay for a broken game and complain only when its far to late, the only way we the gamers can change this is to collectively boycot such endeavours, to teach the pc gaming development community that it is wrong pure and simple to ask for any money up front before a game is completed.
All in all a terrible idea, terrible motivation and not to mention to those devs who have been successful you gotta take a look at the big picture, a lot of these folks have been under tremendous pressure one reason the guy who made minecraft sold up and got out, it was just to much....
So with all that in mind i say bring back the 90's formula the golden age of development, testing, Q&A further testing and quality releases.
I'd rather wait 3 years for a game to be as polished as can be than 2 months for a piece of crap.