Tekdeb

I also think the name “Early Access” is misleading. You’re really paying to become a beta/alpha tester which also includes a license to the full release when/if that happens. If that is what you want, then that’s fine, and the product page always details the current state and plans, but I still think it’s a tiny bit problematic.

Personally I ignore most Early Access games altogether and only buy if the price clearly makes sense for what the game offers at that moment and that seems pretty rare.

Yes, I think that’s a pretty accurate way to describe it.

Yes, their only point is that it looks better “in their minds”, as you say. This feature in particular isn’t meant to improve performance.

Personally I think the more subtle application of it can look pretty good, but it seems hard to control and does more harm than good. And that is even ignoring the massive performance impact that almost guarantees it to be unusable. Nvidia published some performance numbers that looked impressive, but that was using pretty agressive upscaling and 6X frame gen which is stupid because for frame gen to be decent you need a high base frame rate, which they didn’t get on anything other than the 5090 and arguably the 5080, or by pairing the GPU with a lower resolution that doesn’t really make sense for them (like you wouldn’t normally buy a 5070Ti for 1080p).

It’s a very common publishing strategy. Publishers often try to avoid other launches they expect will negatively impact their sales. GTA 6 will be quite expensive and probably very popular, so trying to avoid that makes a lot of sense.

Why not both? If you think the devs deserve the money then you could buy it and keep playing the pirated copy.