Paid early access games on steam are pretty predatory: the developer can literally pull the plug on their project and all the money you've invested on them is gone. This is actually quite common (or so I've read on steam forums), and steam doesn't let you return a game you've sunk more than 2 hours into. So basically the publisher and steam run off with the money you've paid and the publisher has no incentive to keep it going.
Thankfully, I didn't buy any of the more expensive founder's packs for the game I tested, but man I'm really feeling for the people who paid for the expensive ones. The game in question is Breach. It was basically supposed to be a dungeon crawler with match making where a player played as the villain (Veil Demon) and the other 4 players tried to beat the dungeon with the Veil Demon working against them.
Given what I've seen in paid early access on the games I've messed with, I wouldn't recommend touching it with a 10-ft pole: It really has only ever felt like an excuse to release an incomplete game, hoping to run off with the money users paid for it & shut it down. The developers never seem to listen to feedback & improve the game based on it. I've seen even these games listed in popular gaming news sites and some even come from reputable publishers. So really, nothing tells you whether or not these projects will succeed and I would say this: If you're willing to part with that money and expect it to literally mean nothing in 2-6 months, go ahead, buy into a paid early access game. But a real game, won't do that. They'll send out alpha and beta keys and do plenty of their own testing and feedback gathering before pushing a project. And if you think about it, this makes sense: You wouldn't just want anyone testing your game, first impressions mean a lot. You would want your game tested with lots of feedback under NDA so you can improve it without it leaking that it has huge issues, so when it IS ready for market, it has the "Wow!" factor that keeps gamers coming back for more.
