Yeah, that checks out. There’s a number of early access release games that release to little fanfare or changes. If you’re going early access, use it as a prolonged testing period. Then release the full game.
GameDiscoverCo’s Simon Carless analyzed over 1,500 games released between 2015 and 2023, […] His results showed that the longer a game stayed in early access, the weaker its full-release sales tended to be.
Probably because most gamers at this point see EA release as just a release. It kinda begs the question of when it’s useful.
There are tons of scenarios where I can see it being useful, and I can often see a clear difference between it and release, but the problem I’ve got now is that there are so many finished games I could be spending my time and money on right now that it’s hard to justify buying an early access game. I think the last one I bought was Palworld, which I played for about 20 hours right when it came out, and now I’m waiting for 1.0 rather than the iterative feedback that early access thrives on. They’ve still got plenty of people to get that feedback from, but that’s the biggest early access release since Minecraft, so it’s an outlier.
Yeah, that checks out. There’s a number of early access release games that release to little fanfare or changes. If you’re going early access, use it as a prolonged testing period. Then release the full game.
Probably because most gamers at this point see EA release as just a release. It kinda begs the question of when it’s useful.
There are tons of scenarios where I can see it being useful, and I can often see a clear difference between it and release, but the problem I’ve got now is that there are so many finished games I could be spending my time and money on right now that it’s hard to justify buying an early access game. I think the last one I bought was Palworld, which I played for about 20 hours right when it came out, and now I’m waiting for 1.0 rather than the iterative feedback that early access thrives on. They’ve still got plenty of people to get that feedback from, but that’s the biggest early access release since Minecraft, so it’s an outlier.