One of the benefits of purchasing your PC games through Steam is the cost savings you can enjoy due to the regular sales the service has. There's always games set at full price when they launch, but they soon fall and eventually become available for a handful of dollars.
Now one developer is trying something new on Steam–offering early access to an unfinished game, but charging $90 for the privilege.
That game is Planetary Annihilation by Uber Entertainment, and it actually started life as a Kickstarter back in August last year. Charging $90 for an unfinished game understandably may seem a little ridiculous to a gamer seeing it for the first time on Steam, but the price was set back when the Kickstarter was still active and trying to reach its $900,000 funding goal. In the end the Kickstarter raised $2.2 million.
Uber makes it clear in the Steam forums that this is the price set at the time of the Kickstarter. If you want to play the game between June and the end of August it will cost $90. At this point features aren't locked down, but your purchase means you get access to the final retail game with all the add-ons.
If you don't mind waiting, then buying the game between September and November will cost $60, which nets you an almost complete, but unbalanced game. After that, the game is set to launch in December and you'll pay whatever price they set for the final game. Basically the longer you wait the cheaper it gets, so the $90 you pay today is for the impatient or those gamers really enthused by the game but who missed the Kickstarter.
The pricing strategy makes sense when you understand it, but that clearly hasn't happened within the Steam gaming community. There's also an increasing number of zero-rated reviews on Metacritic, many of which mention the price as a reason. Hopefully Uber can manage the situation and launch to great reviews in December.