Osiris: New Dawn breaks through, but will it survive Early Access?

[Administrator]

In the primordial soup that is Steam Early Access a new game is being formed. It's called Osiris: New Dawn and since its appearance a few weeks back it's been bobbing about with Mafia 3, Civ 6 and Rocket League in the Top Seller list. If you haven't already taken a cursory gander, you can probably guess from its sudden rise to prominence that it's an open world collect-and-survive game, one of an increasing number of like-minded titles that simmer around Steam's development fumarole, sometimes evolving, sometimes not, and whose creators are often dragged beneath the toxic discourse that bellows up in the wake of an absent, insubstantial or unpopular update.
Quite why Osiris has taken off so early in its life cycle is hard to fully pin down. Perhaps it has something to do with the backlash that followed the September release of Scorched Earth for the dinosaur-themed ARK: Survival Evolved, its developer - arguably rather greedily - releasing it as fully-formed premium update to an eminently playable but unfinished game. Or maybe, despite both being significantly different in scope, favourable comparisons with No Man's Sky are similarly causing people to reassign their optimism towards Fenix Fire, rather than in this case leaving it in the hands of Hello Games' capacity to make good on its vague intimations. (Which begs the question where might No Man's Sky be had it gone for the Early Access route? The answer to which, for better or worse, is, still there.)
Then there is the more obvious explanation, that people still can't get enough open world survival games, which on the face of it seems reasonable to assume. However, given the sheer number of them, and the fact that there's currently at least one for every theme and style of play, people must surely be running low in their capacity to play them all, regardless of their respective states of completion. In the case of, er, sci-fi-val games (sorry), there is already an accomplished roster of titles that has beaten Osiris in the race to colonise new worlds: Empyrion, Space Engineers, Eden Star, Take On Mars, Starbound - to name but a few.
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