Most video games usually have a shelf life for at least a couple of years. You can see them at places like Target, Walmart or Gamestop, the latter having games released for previous consoles if they were successful or not. A game may not be successful, but they typically are available for more than three days. However, this is not the case for the Early Access version of In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor by developer Arcen Games, says Kotaku.
The game has been removed from the Steam shelves and has refunded the players who bought the game. Even though the goal of selling a game is to make money, Arcen Games CEO Chris Park explained that the Early Access’s goal was not to make money, but to market.
I stated upfront that our reason for doing Early Access with this game was partly as a market survey of sorts. I felt like that would be a way of determining how big this game could get. With Starward Rogue, and indeed some of our other past commercial failures, we put in everything and the kitchen sink and then there wasn’t a market there.
Park confessed that In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor was lacking in many ways. Arcen wanted to make their games as great as possible, but since hardly anyone bought the game, it seems that Arcen didn’t do a very good job. A middle ground, spear headed by Valve was to make the game free-to-play. Park explained why he like the move:
Various people wanted to play the game, and we spent a lot of time making it, so this was better than just taking it off the face of the earth.
Arcen decided that they would be working on adding a sequel to their most popular game, AI War and make a game with a similar concept to In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor if the free version went well but the “emergency release” failed, so it would be hard to make a successful game from a concept that failed on a game before.