While Steam's year-long experiment with selling unfinished games through its "Early Access" program has had its share of issues, it's hard to understate the impact it has had on the way PC games are developed, marketed, and sold, with games like Day Z and Rust becoming best sellers before they're even finished. This hasn't gone unnoticed by console developers or by Sony and Microsoft, both of which have been hinting they might introduce their own "Early Access" style programs for their consoles soon.

In a recent interview with Gamasutra, Sony Publisher and Developer Relations VP Adam Boyes said finding a smart way to give players access to games that aren't finished yet is "one of the massive conversations we have internally." One of the major barriers, he said, is making the development state of the game clear to potential purchasers. "We don't want somebody to stumble across that title and expect a full product, and have a negative experience."

Boyes went on to say that Sony is working out guidelines for just how early a game can be before being offered to PlayStation customers. "We obviously have our tech requirement checklist that people have to adhere to," Boyes said. "So we're internally discussing, what does that list look like? What are the caveats? Stuff like this. So it's still a project that a lot of minds are considering. No details yet, but it's something on the top of my mind every day."

On the Microsoft side, ID@Xbox Manager Chris Charla told Develop that a similar "early access" scheme on Xbox consoles is "something developers have been asking for, and we are listening really closely to developers." While stopping short of a new program announcement, he noted that developers can already release private betas on Microsoft systems as a way of getting unfinished titles out there.

Still, Charla says Microsoft also wants to avoid confusing consumers and letting totally broken, unfinished games be placed in front of players. "There's a lot of heavy deep thinkers, experts, PhDs working on these problems at Xbox every day—not just for the Xbox store, but for Windows Store and Windows Phone," Charla said. "Our goal is to have a rational marketplace, where good games are visible and sell well."

This is going to be a big issue if and when console makers decide to jump fully into the "early access" game. While PC players are by now used to games that require new drivers or downloaded patches after release to get into their best playable form, console players are more accustomed to games that "just work" from the get go (though there's been some console backsliding on this score in recent years). Both Sony and Microsoft are going to have to make it very clear to a living room audience that the game they're buying might not be up to the usual level of polish of a console game.