Hello all, Dani here, Game Director on Killsquad. As we move closer to launch, I wanted to look back, and share a bit of an Early Access post-mortem with you, the community. Talk about Killsquad. What we did right. What we did wrong. What I would do differently. And, of course, explain what we want to do next. So, I hope you enjoy it, and of course let’s all comment and discuss this below!

Early Access – Good stuff

Killsquad was born on the last months of the Kickstarter phenomenon. You will all recall: a team goes into Kickstarter, says “hey, we want to do game X, give us Y cash”. And off they went, with the cash. Sometimes they returned with a great game, sometimes they failed. Due to this second group of broken promises, Kickstarter lost traction soon for large games: when some games didn’t release at all, or released underwhelmingly, fans ran away, understandably. It’s a shame, as the idea of the community backing a project sounded really good on paper (and to give credit to Kickstarter, that has been fixed since).

Meanwhile, here in Barcelona, we were watching. As we’ve said a few times, we’re an ex-Sony studio, we were used to being funded by a publisher, and for a long time we had wanted to do something on our own. But we lacked funds. We had some money, but not all we required to build a good game. That game we were dreaming of was Killsquad, a Diablo / Left4Dead / Gauntlet hybrid. And, looking at the issues with Kickstarter, we thought: hey, Early Access is a much better idea: instead of selling “hope only”, we could actually give a running game demo, so fans could *play* and *see* the potential for real. We thought: people will try Killsquad, and say “yes, this has potential, so I’m going to back it”. Early Access was our way of saying “we won’t let you down, we will give you a really good game, please trust us”.

For us, Early Access was Kickstarter on steroids. Do I think the same way, now, 2 years down the line? Generally speaking, YES. I feel EA allows us to 1) prove our worth 2) raise money to keep working on the game. For those who know me, I’m not one to shy away from data. So here’s some numbers: Killsquad has sold approx. 110k units in Early Access, resulting in a revenue for us of roughly 1.5M USD. Does this cover costs? No, not completely. Does this help cover costs? You bet!

So YES, Early Access was for us a way to be able to make this game. In that respect, we are super thankful to every one of you, those who backed the project, be it on the first day of EA, or yesterday. This game exists because of YOU, simple as that, so thank you. We’ll never get tired of saying that.
Another positive aspect of Early Access is you get constant feedback. God, it’s SO hard to figure out what is the best game you should do. And, you know what? When you have 110.000 players, it becomes easier. You realize faster that your progression system sucks. You realize sooner that we need in game items. That your missions are too long. And so on. Both with regular updates, and Betas, we had 110.000 pairs of eyes telling us what to fix next. And this proved invaluable.

Last, but not least, as we say in Spanish, sometimes the destination is not the goal, the goal is the path you take to get there. This 2 years of EA are SO full to the brim with good conversations, discussions, fights (yes, those are welcome too!), that we wouldn’t change it for anything. It’s been a wild ride, YES, but one we will remember forever. Early Access gives you a deep dive into communities, and it’s great to have been part of this community of Bounty Hunters.

Early Access, the not so good

Of course every rose has thorns, and Early Access is no different. Through months and conversations, many of you in our community have shown interest in the “inner workings” of game development, and some of you actually work in games. So, I feel it’s honest and important to show you the ugly side of things as well. Maybe some of this can be useful to you! So, here are our not-so-positive learnings from all this crazy wild adventure

The first downside to Early Access is that it’s REALLY hard to commit to roadmaps when you’re doing live development. Say you think goals A, B and C are important. Then, you release an update with goal A in it. And, seeing the feedback, you realise B and C are not that important anymore, and you should do D instead. This is extremely frequent because games are dynamic things, and we don’t know how the game will respond to each change. And, when we need to do these changes to the roadmap, it’s really hard to communicate them to the community. During our 15 updates (yes, 15) we discovered many things, changed plans, and tried to explain the best we could why we were doing these changes. I hope now, in hindsight, you guys feel a) we knew what we were doing all along b) we only did this to make the game better, no hidden agenda. But there were lots of really tough calls. Some of you guys would prefer us sticking to a certain roadmap, but knowing where you will be 2 years ahead is basically reading the future. We failed in this respect, maybe we should have communicated better. But we feel the whole “Early Access Roadmap” is a complicated matter.

The second (really big!) downside of Early Access is review scores. Check it out: Killsquad has had +80 review score for ALL months since January 2021. ALL of them. So, you’d think this is the review assigned to our game, right? NO! If you look at the average review, it’s about 68-69. Why? Because Steam averages all reviews equally: recent or old, all matter the same. We feel this is unfair. We should get the score for the game we are TODAY, not the game we were 2 years ago. Check this out: No Man’s Sky just crossed 70 review score last week. More than 5 years after launch. With several million games sold, and a rock-solid reputation of commitment to quality. Why? They had 24k negative reviews during the first month. It’s not our job to judge other people’s work. But it’s obvious that, with that initial scenario, Hello Games had an extremely long and steep hill for them to climb to compensate for the early reviews. And so they did: they have done an awesome job, if you ask me. As a consequence, if you look at the data, No Man’s Sky has been with “Very Positive” reviews since August 2019. And only NOW they have a 70? Come on! It’s unfair it takes so long for developers who do a good job to compensate for early negative Reviews: if you’re in version 1.5, and it’s a great game, why do reviews from version 1.0 still count towards the final tally? You’re not even that game anymore!

Luckily, our case is less steep: we only have 2 thousand reviews roughly, but still seeing your game in “mixed” reviews land (68-69) when your recent reviews have been saying “very positive” for 8 months in a row sucks. Big time. Kills team morale. And it’s a shame, as it seems we push people for reviews (because we’re trying to compensate those early reviews) and hey, it’s not fair for you, our fans to feel pushed. I hate it, I really do. In an ideal world, those players from the early weeks would update their reviews, and some of them would move from negative to positive, to compensate. Well, truth is: that rarely happens. Reviewers often forget the games they played, and maybe we’ve managed to change a handful of reviews. And again, we’re not complaining about YOU, the fans. We’re saying the Steam review system penalises Early Access games, especially those with long Early Access times. And it’s a shame: Valve has done more than anyone for the PC games scene, and we think Steam is the best invention since bread came sliced. But, at the same time, we feel they should look into this: Early Access games are the lifeblood of indie studios, many of them having contributed killer games to our industry. Not rating their work appropriately is unfair, and will kill companies that are essential to keep our industry exciting and creative.

So yes, now I need to get pushy and ask for a positive review. Or for you guys to update your reviews if you feel we deserve it. Which I hate to do, as it’s unfair to you: it’s not your fault that the Steam system is biased. But having a game with a 87 recent review score and a 68 overall review score is so unfair: reviews are there to inform prospective buyers, who will buy the game TODAY. So, we should be valued for who we are TODAY, not for who we were two years ago. Our Early Access dream scenario would be to launch with a +70 overall review score: that means more visibility, and more sales. So, if you can devote one minute to giving us a thumbs up, it means the world to us. It’s really that simple.

Now what?

So most of you are asking: yeah, Dani, but what’s the plan? Ok, here we go: our intent is to release Killsquad out of Early Access on the first week of October, date still to be decided with Steam. The game will be exactly the one you see now, just with more polish, bug fixing, and minor updates such as the achievements drops we’re doing, balancing, etc.

As we warned, the game will come out slightly higher price, which we will announce soon. Raising price comes for 2 reasons: first, we want to make sure our EA backers got the game at the most attractive price. Second, we want to use this extra funding to keep improving the game. Doing games is expensive!

I think after 2 years in Early Access our commitment to Killsquad is proven. I remember back then, someone on forums saying “oh this game will go nowhere and you guys will abandon it”. Well, here we are. 15 major updates later. 80+ review score. No, we didn’t go anywhere. Not then, and not in the foreseeable future. We want to keep improving the game. Killsquad is a passion project, and a source of reputation for us: we won’t let you guys down. We will keep adding stuff.

And with that in mind, we will be announcing a whole post-release Roadmap soon, so that you can see that we are not done with the game even after it’s out. We will show you what our plans for the game are, and what you can expect from it in the future. Keep your eyes out for that News update.

Wrapping up

So, this is our post-mortem, and a bit of a plan for the future. As you can see, we still believe Early Access is a great tool to build great game, despite all shortcomings and downsides. We’re extremely happy to see the recent evolution of Killsquad, we feel the game is ready for big time, and we have exciting plans for the future.

At this point, our only request would be: please do post a review if you have a second to spare (or update your review if you feel we deserve it). As we’ve explained, we firmly believe Early Access games are at a disadvantage because they are dragged down by early review scores. And it’s a shame, as EA is a great way for developers to “break through”. If these games are dragged down, there will be less EA releases, and we feel that is bad for all of us.

That’s all for today, this was a dense post, but one we really wanted to share with you guys. It’s exciting weeks ahead, we hope you’ll live this adventure with us, and can’t wait to show you what comes next!