Hello, all! So over the last few days since launch, we’ve gotten a lot of questions and suggestions and have been engaging with the community. We’ve already started working on changes and features based on your feedback.
Which has brought up the question from several players, “wait, this game isn’t early access?!”
In hindsight, we probably should have been labeled Early Access in Steam. The guidelines say that you should only launch Early Access if you’re planning on continuing development no matter how well the game sells, though, and we were not going to be able to do that if the game did not sell well.
Given this is a game designed to help teach about the flow of matter through ecosystems, and our first released title, we were not expecting to make a splash on Steam, and have already sold 4x more than we expected, which quickly re-aligned our expectations.
As the Steam community has seen, we are working with you and listening to your feedback, and already working on improvements, like a game in Early Access would do. So in hindsight after seeing what the response has been, yes, that would have been a good idea!
Regardless, we don’t see a hard distinction in the current games market between early or full releases of games. We believe in interacting with our users, engaging with feedback (both positive and negative), and working with our community. We’ll continue to do so as the game continues to sell and provoke reactions, and as our community continues to invest their time into playing it.
So hopefully, even though this was not labeled as Early Access, the community here is enjoying the process and learning together, because we certainly have been. Feel free to continue to give us your comments on the Discussion threads, share YouTube videos, and Screenshots.
We’ve loved reading/seeing/watching, and are getting ideas on what we can do to improve as we see where you all struggle and succeed in your gameplay. People sharing stories and experiences, and spending their valuable time playing our game, is driving us to continue to improve the game and challenge ourselves. Thank you all!