I regret backing Elite Dangerous, it's underwhelming.

And this is the unfortunate problem with the agile “release an MVP and iterate” approach when talking about a game. Unlike a SaaS product that might initially solve a problem, a game needs to be compelling, make a good first impression, and be fun, all out of the gate, to retain player interest. The Early Access model has continued to fail because people try the early version, dislike it (because it isn’t finished), then leave bad reviews and never return to see the game’s progress.

Elite continues to get better all the time and will likely eventually be a pretty good game, but it’ll never have the audience it would have if they had the budget to release a full and finished product on day 1.

I think that's because many early access developers don't put enough focus on the "Viable" aspect, and focus too hard on "Minimum". For a game to be viable it should express its core gameplay features in a compelling way. Iteration should just be building additional content on top of that, or building new modules that live on top of the core (like the FPS aspects of Star Citizen arguably should be).

True but I'd say it's that minimum and viable are much closer to the final product with games making the whole notion less useful.

that is very true, but with a huge game like Star Citizen you could likely strip out a huge share of the intended final-cut content and still have a quality and complete product.

Didn’t Minecraft release (obviously successfully) with this approach?

Minecraft released in alpha where you couldn't even mine or craft yet. In alpha it was basically a voxel terrain generator with a 1st person flying around view

No, in Alpha it was playable, with crafting and mining.

You're thinking of Classic or Pre-Classic. And IIRC, Survival Test (with mining and crafting) was the first thing you had to pay for to play. https://web.archive.org/web/20090904213840/http://www.minecr...

Me too, it just felt dull. I particularly regret it as they promised a single player version that would work without a network, and delivered a network-only game that requires a server to run. I much prefer the X3 games than E:D. They have an interesting mixture of dog fighting, empire building and missions, although the learning curve is steep.

The irony being that it's basically what SC promised in their KS.

If E:D is what SC has promised in their KS they are finished. Fly around for half an hour in the SC dogfighting mode, fly a bit more in the open world, maybe do a mission. Done. You have now fully experienced E:D. And that's with the current state of the Alpha.