Why even go early access?
Money why else? For some studios they need financing and it's a nice way to do it. The gamers can also see the development of the game bit by bit and so of become involved in the process. They watch it grow so to speak.
And why could this be bad?
Think of it this way imagine there is a game called "Big Bad John" and Big Bad John goes on early release, and people are really amazed and how good it looks and the potential it has. The game studio has a nice site and promo video for it and things look good, people buy the game early access and the studio immediately starts to get some funding which is great, developers could get paid, more licenses can be bought perhaps software that needed an expensive license can now be purchased or whatever.
What a lot of developers are not counting on is the immediate pressure that they are putting themselves under, the developers and everyone all of a sudden are under the spotlight. The gamers know how well progress is going whether it's slow or going as expected so it's hard to mask that if something unexpected happens. The whole development process generally becomes public and because people have already shelled out for it, that's exactly what they expect...development. If Big Bad John doesn't make decent developmental progress over the coming months eventually players will wish they never bothered in the first place and will play the next early access game that shows potential.
Lets face it nobody wants a steam library full of early access, incomplete games do they? So you also have to think about just how many early access games are knocking about at the moment. If two or three games are doing really well then people might not want to pay out for another incomplete game (because bottom line that's what an early access game is) no matter how good Big Bad John looks.
Suppose that the final release day comes for Big Bad Johnson, do you think sales will soar? Probably not, you'll have an instant spike for the final release (lets face it some people just won't buy early access games from past experience) but generally people have already bought it. Take the amount of people who have bought Rust and Dayz, when and IF they make there final release date they won't exactly be shifting millions of copies because they have already sold so many on early access.
Are the Studios required to finish the game after you've bought it?
No! Absolutely not, if you look through the terms you'll probably find that they can at any time turn around and say "you know what? this project is shit lets cancel it". It's going to happen one day and lot of people are not going to be happy about it. Recently the Dayz project leader has walked, citing it a "Flawed Project". No you can take that in a number ways, me personally I take it as "well you were the project leader so if it is flawed it is only because you let it be and now you're doing a runner because the bubble burst"), still things like this throw the game into doubt.
Are the studios required to do constant updates?
Again no, and it's not uncommon for early access games to have no updates for months on end and then have a small minor one. The smaller ones pick up for a few months at a time and then go quiet for the rest of the year. Lets look at Starbound, at first everybody was into it and the idea. However lack of updates, lack of actual signs of developmental progress has seen people jump to Rust and Days. The Starbound bubble has now burst, and Rust and Dayz are heading the same way so that leaves us with the question:
When will the Early Access Game fad come to an end?
It's not worked, studios have not been able to live up to the demand of the gamers from this method.
