This master’s thesis tries to establish a connection between the user rating of Early Access games, the user experience of the provided bugtracker and feedback tools and the influence these have on sales. The study is based on a mixed method approach consisting of a case study of seven selected Early Access games available on the Steam platform as well as a survey conducted online with 113 participants. The findings of my survey, indicated that about half of the people buying Early Access games, do so with the intention of helping the games developers, and ¾ of all users are motivated to actively take part in the task of reporting bugs and giving feedback. However, according to my survey most users are dissatisfied with a lot of the design choices taken on the bug trackers, and 93,8% of all participants abandon their reporting, as soon as they run into a problem.
The findings of this thesis indicate, that there is indeed a connection between a frustrating user experience when reporting bugs, the resulting bad user reviews and how well a game sells on Steam.