Early access periods should ideally be around six months, research suggests
A prolonged early access period can dampen post-launch sales, statistical data from 2021 to 2024 suggests.
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.
His results showed that the longer a game stayed in early access, the weaker its full-release sales tended to be.
I mean, this seems kinda inevitable, no? The longer you're in early access, the larger the portion of your target audience has likely already bought your game.
Yeah. IMO the research has taken a wrong metric and come to kind of a useless conclusion. If your goal is to have a lot of new players at launch then of course a short early access is better. Theoretically even better would be to skip early access and go straight to 1.0 because then you have less people who picked up the game during early access.
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's about right I could see a little bit longer depending on the game and the Developers but two years or three years tops is probably my limit on a game. After that point I don't really pay attention to it anymore.
How about just not releasing via early access at all?
I'll allow it for smaller studios that have a big, offbeat idea. Games like Factorio, Satisfactory, Kerbal Space Program and Subnautica. All of these games had multi-year early access campaigns that were very successful, Satisfactory in particular. I think it's appropriate for weird games like these that have uncommon mechanics like factory building, space flight or scuba diving.
Thinking about Satisfactory, I imagine their sales weren't spectacular on launch day last year, but a lot of their customer base had already bought the game, so they got their $30. Maybe another way to phrase it is, who cares if it sells before or after launch?
Looking at you, beamNG.drive
