There are also orders of magnitude of difference in their staff levels and budgets. Both sides of the equation are relative. I don’t know of any techniques for creating good content quickly and inexpensively that only work for small indies and not for large AAA studios.
It’s a fuck load of work to make a game. It is kinda ridiculous to go to all that trouble then just stop after making 2 hours of gameplay, like 2 hours total without even a good sandbox.
Not that it’s Steam’s fault, but this is the same way of thinking that has led to big budget, story focused games getting padded with repetitive fetch quests and annoying collectibles that unlock progression.
Yes, it’s a lot of work to make a game, but the only way to extend the play time of a story-focused single-player game without having to do even more work, is to water it down with low-effort filler content that reuses the expensive assets.
I don’t know that it’s usually naked greed for indies, as much as it’s an effort to boost initial sales and get word-of-mouth going by preying on FOMO.
But yes, I’d be behind delayed special editions. More than once I’ve found out that some indie game had limited extra content for early buyers, and when people asked later if that content would ever be more widely available, the developers gave a slightly smug “Nope! I guess you should’ve backed it / bought it at launch, huh?”-style response.
I know that your life has probably been revolving around this game for months or years, but I only heard about it for the first time yesterday, and your backer campaign / launch sale ended 8 months ago. All you’re doing with that attitude is souring potential customers.
I think it’s better to offer the extras again at a later time, as part of a special edition and/or a separate bundle. Plenty of games do this, too.
I bought a physical copy for PC cheap on sale, and never played it (my PC at the time wouldn’t run it for some reason IDR).
Now I live in Japan and it’s not available for sale here, on GOG or Steam, so I hope I can get that disc to work under Linux! I see there’s an official patch that removes the DRM, but there’s one for North America, and another for Europe, and I bought the game in Australia, so I it’s a coin flip which one I’ve got. Hopefully once I install it there’ll be some clues.
I prefer to buy from GOG, itch, or anywhere else that offers explicitly DRM-free downloads. That being said, a surprising number of games on Steam are actually DRM-free (or as near as makes no difference). They don’t make it easy; you need to dig through your Steam folders to copy the files out, and sometimes you need to jump through a well-documented hoop or two, but it’s doable.
More info here: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam