Minecraft was certainly a big part of the "open alpha/beta", early access and pre-order to get into the alpha/beta sort of selling concepts.
That is because it became immensely popular and sold many, many copies, even at the time of alpha/beta stage.
Other companies followed suit but what they didn't think of is that the same concept doesn't work as well in every situation.
For example, why implement an early access for a game which is greatly story driven.
People will literally spoil the game for themselves if they play an early access of those.
Second of all, the fact that every company is now like: "Get in the Early Access now and be part of the development!", is not a very good thing.
Notch listened to SOME input on his game, but mostly he stayed true to his intentions for it and mostly made it like he had it in mind.
Having a large group of people testing the game is nice, you can get a lot of bugs fixed that way since a lot of people will do things you didn't have in mind.
But as for listening to players for suggestions as to what they should do with the game, that is really hard to do well.
Why? Not everyone is the same, so not everyone wants the same.
If you do a thing a lot of people suggest, you will always have another group of people who would want it another way.
You can never satisfy all of the players.
As for balancing based on player feedback, some people just are better then others, in which case you would have players screaming that something is OP, while in reality, they just could never beat some players who used that strategy while others could.
Sure, they can be right sometimes and it is important to keep them in mind.
But after all, developers should not lose the control over their game to the public.
The public can help them, but in my honest opinion, the public should never decide what is best for the game.
That really should be the developers.
And i have the feeling that a lot of the developers today that use the early access concept give out too much control to the public.
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