Maelstrom and stretch goals

[Stg-Flame]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/764050/Maelstrom/

So this game looks outstanding but upon further reading, it seems a lot of the proposed content is being locked away behind player counts. If X number of people buy the game, they will add Y feature. If another X amount of people buy their game, they add Z feature. From what I've read, they reached their stretch funding for these goals, but they decided to hold them hostage (125,000 copies sold just for a single player campaign). It feels like a cop-out to me in that if they don't get the PUBG or Fortnite numbers right off the bat, they can say the game wasn't popular enough to warrant extra features.

Most people know I'm against the idea of Early Access, but I understand why it exists and why it's effective. I also see a trend with developers who open their game to EA too early see the development process screech to a near-grinding halt (looking at you 7 Days to Die and Wolcen). Some developers open their game too early (Starbound) and people get bored playing the same old 13% of what's supposed to be a full game with very little in the way of updates and developmental progress whereas other developers actually do it right and listen to their players (Grim Dawn) and make changes accordingly along with non-stop development and features.

Your thoughts?

 

[Newbian]

I guess it's either do that or sell enough to update the game but this way people try to get others to play for more content.

I have seen this done during kickstarter phases to get more support for it so they promise more content then.

Doing it after it's released if it becomes popular enough will get more games to do it and thus they can blame early access and not enough people playing it for lack of updates I guess.

I seen a few streamers play it and it's mostly meh as it's just another battle royal style game it seemed but with pirate ships.

The only concern now is with game tracking done because of steams recent updates is who will be able to say how close their sales are to the next tier?