One of our players wrote this on Witchfire‘s Steam forum:
Early access is like asking a ton of unknowledgeable people that don’t cook into a kitchen to make food instead of an experienced chef – you’re not going to get a ton of good feedback in general and the good feedback will be buried in tons of useless nonsense or emotional things that have nothing to do with your game […].
Lots to unpack, as the kids say these days (do they still?).
But before I get to why Early Access works for the developer, let’s think for a second why some players like it and buy games that are in Early Access.
I think there are two major reasons.
Back in the 1990s, a friend who ran Poland’s biggest gaming magazine told me that most reader letters asked for behind-the-scenes content about game development. This is why they asked me to write a monthly dev diary of sorts for the mag, which I did for a couple of years.
So I think one reason why some people might buy Early Access games is to witness the evolution of a game. To participate in the discussions about it with devs and fellow players, to see and experience firsthand how the project changes, morphs, and grows. To see what it takes to bring the game to final quality and how to deal with the development and marketing.
The second major reason is simpler. There’s a saying in Poland, “the quality of your sleep depends on how well you made your bed.” I don’t think “as you make your bed, so you must lie in it” conveys it well, but “as a man sows, so shall he reap” does. In other words, if a player likes a genre or a game, participating in Early Access allows them to directly and indirectly influence the final shape of the game.
I can offer a perfect example. There was a brief period when Witchfire got a bit cartoonish – colorful, with looter shooter vibes:
2019. Placeholder HUD. Still… Ew…
Players were disappointed and told us this wasn’t what they wanted from the game they fell in love with through the moody dark fantasy teaser. We murdered that new look faster than John Wesley Hardin drew his Colt.
To tell you the truth, we had already come to the same conclusion ourselves, but the strength of the players’ reaction not only confirmed we weren’t wasting any more time on the cheery looter shooter vibes, but also made “dark fantasy, stupid!” a non-negotiable tentpole of the game.
Are there more reasons why people might buy an Early Access game? Sure. Wanting to be in the avant-garde, to taste something fresh before others. Wanting to have something that refreshes with each update, offering great value for money. We even have players who bought Witchfire now just to support us, and they are not touching it until the final release.
Sweet. Okay. But why would a developer want to go Early Access with their game?
The first and obvious answer is money. Most Early Access games come from indie developers, and Early Access is a way to keep the studio afloat.
In our case, we did not have an issue with organizing money, but it would come at the cost of having to sell some of the studio to investors. Going Early Access on EGS allowed us to keep 100% of our independence, and opening Early Access on Steam allowed us to secure the future and grow the studio.
The second reason is course corrections. Yes, individual feedback might get lost in the noise, but when it’s repeated, it will be heard. For example, players were crystal clear about how imbalanced the Calamities were a year ago. Their feedback made fixing that feature our priority, and the game is better for it.
Gnosis is an even more spectacular example: it exists because we needed to address the difficulty—and the cheesing of it—that players were vocal about.
Is this something regular testers would reveal, too? Maybe. Maybe not. Do studios really thoroughly test the game at every major stage of development, using hundreds of testers? Very few do. It’s a giant cost, and only some can afford it. Certainly not an indie studio.
But there’s more here. Something even more important.
The way you develop the game when in Early Access is very different from the way you develop the game the old school way. This could be an entire post in itself, so let me just give you the outline.
The old school way is developing and implementing multiple features at the same time, and actually, it’s quite blurry what the “stage” of such development is. There’s always something going on; the game is in a permanent work-in-progress stage.
With Early Access, not only is it easy to divide the game into stages, but you also keep it all clean to make sure the next update goes well. As a result, it is easier to see the big picture, as each stage is clearly defined both feature-wise and content-wise. Thus, it’s easier for us to understand what next steps would make the game better.
Better!...
The third reason is actually connected to the above: the keeping it clean part.
I cannot find the exact quote, but a Blizzard dev, when asked why a release was buggy despite the studio having access to hundreds of testers, replied that in the first hour after launch, the game was played by a thousand times more people than during the entire development.
Games are really complex now, and even if you’re the best developer in the world, once your game is out, someone will find something. Early Access helps us keep the project in a much cleaner state than the old school way of squashing the bugs right before the release.
The fourth reason is something I call a nudge. As a studio full of creative people, we do not suffer from a shortage of ideas. But people discussing things out loud on our Discord or Steam forum, or proposing this or that in the Suggestion section, do sway the needle. We often use quotes from the players or their general sentiment in our dev chats.
Actually, sometimes it all goes beyond nudging the design in a certain direction and directly spawns a feature that would not have existed otherwise.
Now let’s look again at the quote from the beginning of the post:
Early access is like asking a ton of unknowledgeable people that don’t cook into a kitchen to make food instead of an experienced chef – you’re not going to get a ton of good feedback in general and the good feedback will be buried in tons of useless nonsense or emotional things that have nothing to do with your game […].
It’s an interesting observation but I don’t think this is 100% correct.
First, logically, if there’s “good feedback” that gets “buried,” then we cannot say that only “unknowledgeable people” participate. In reality, it’s indeed a mix of players of every kind, from trolls to deeply knowledgeable, experienced veterans that intuitively understand game design.
Second, note how the first three major reasons I offered in favor of a developer going Early Access have nothing to do with the above quote. So even if the noise was indeed a big weakness of Early Access, there are more than enough reasons to still do it.
Third, yes, there’s noise. But we consider the feedback valuable enough that we have our QA guys monitor the Discord and forums and report daily, we have devs participating in discussions, and we have just hired a Community Manager to help with the matters even more: to distill the non-bug-related feedback and suggestions into a daily or weekly digest for the studio. Hopefully, he will be able to start in January.
Fourth, and I know this may sound surprising, but I believe that “useless nonsense or emotional things that have nothing to do with your game” is often feedback one needs to seriously and honestly consider. You will need to dig deeper to understand where this or that sentiment is coming from or why, say, something seemingly simple and innocent got an emotional response from the players, but quite often this is as important and as influential to the game as the regular “logical” feedback.
So yeah, there’s noise in Early Access — but in my opinion, it’s worth dealing with. Witchfire is a better game because of it.
And here’s my favorite argument for Early Access lately: Hades, developed this way, was an incredible success for Supergiant. They made mountains of money and earned players’ love and respect. They could have easily chosen to go the old-school development route with Hades 2, maybe just using more testers than your average indie studio can afford. But they didn’t. Hades 2 is also an Early Access game. That tells you something’s working well here, doesn’t it?
One last thing I want to add is that all of the above may not apply to every game and every developer. I’m not going to pretend like every Early Access game is developed with the best of intentions or that it will deliver joy to people looking to see how a game evolves or to taste it before it gets big. I am only speaking for us, The Astronauts. For us, Early Access and the involvement of players have been a blast — and we hope the game is a blast for you, too.
Next week, news on the WM update. Till then!
Question of the Week
Good question. Somebody else asked about underusing Shift, too.
Generally, it’s not wise for us to use the “system” keys like Esc, Enter, Shift, etc. Not only this sometimes causes issues with Windows, it also clashes with some resident software — and PC players love their Shadowplay, TinyTask, overcloakers, Beeftext, ShareX and many more. So many more.
But we will look into it. After all, PCs are all about customization of the experience. If you have any other things you want done in this area, feel free to ping us on X or talk about it on our Discord.