10 Years Later, Early Access Turned Out Okay – Cold Take

I went a little bit into this in the Factorio Stuff of Legends video (that you should go watch cause there’s a quiz at the end), but basically around the 2010s Early Access was a lawless wasteland ruled by caveat emptor. That’s Latin (darlin’) for “buyer beware.” That means when you are purchasing anything from online video game retailers, it is 100% your responsibility to be as safe as possible. All sales are final. If that sale of what you presumed to be a quirky new survival horror game turns out to be three viruses in a trench coat that stole your social security number then it’s your fault. There is no support ticket you can email. There is no customer service you can call in. There are no refund policies. You lose. Good day, sir.

The upside of this dog eat dog marketplace is the consumer could potentially find themselves an unrefined gem of a game at a fraction of a fraction of the eventual full release price. These early adopters could provide feedback and help shape the game to their liking while it was still in the most pliable and experimental phase. Minecraft is possibly one of the more well-known success stories of a small studio with an early access approach, more commonly referred to as an alpha release in those days, but not every dream game made by three people is a Minecraft–as much as they’d like to convince you that they are. The downside of the every-consumer-for-themselves approach is that sellers always have the advantage, because they can just lie, as in the case of Earth: 2066. The gameplay trailers and the screenshots can be completely fabricated so that people think they’re looking at a shoddy work-in-progress instead of empty asset drop scams.

As much as marketplaces like Steam would like to believe this was online no-holds barred consumerism, it was simply hosting shady services in virtual international waters where real-world laws had yet to kick in. At the time you had people like TotalBiscuit citing UK laws such as the Sale of Goods Act to call out the Early Access program as downright immoral and illegal. Fit For Purpose means the item has to at least function and Satisfactory Quality means the buyers need to be made fully aware of the current condition of the product, both of which were being abused by code-based conmen in developer’s clothing. The entire system was on shaky ground until Steam implemented quality control and a refund policy, but there was still a development side problem. While scammers made up a smaller part of the whole, by 2015 only 25% of early access games were even seeing a final release. Games like Arma 3 were the first to be accepted into the program and graduated in 2013, but others like DayZ prolonged their development to the point where you couldn’t be blamed for presuming them dead. And others, like Project Zomboid, are still in early access development after 10 years, and you know what? I think it was well worth it. The waiting. Not the scamming.

Given the amount of games that die before the finish line, early access offers a second and third chance to games like Dave The Diver that build up a small following during the development phase. Hades was the Game of The Year in 2020 for many major publications, and it is an alumni of the academy of Early Access. Their existence becomes a sort of gamer rumor in passing. “Did you hear about this scuba diving sushi fishing game?” Then you hear about it once more upon full release, but because it was in early access it already has an established reputation and public feedback. You don’t have to feel like you’re going in for a blind purchase, equally thrilling as it is intimidating. Even if it doesn’t end up being what you expected, the new refund policy is yet another safety net for the consumer. You know something must be going well, or it’s a sign of Armageddon, when my partner in crime Benjamin “Yahtzee ‘I-don’t-review-early-access-games’” Croshaw breaks his one rule and we’re gumshoeing for baddies in the procedurally generated immersive detective sim Shadows of Doubt, while it is still in early access.

The one thing I am struggling to come to terms with is the new public feedback cycle. I prefer strong developer vision over crowd pleasing. For example, I love Darkest Dungeon (the first one.) I, like many other reprobates, fell in love with the idea of an existentially dreadful party based dungeon crawler. The organic storytelling that oozed out as you tried to fight off certain doom, and emphasis on failure, filled a space that other games haven’t quite touched since. But the sequel feels as if the most decisive feedback came from players who did not like the core of the original. Naturally, because people who dislike your games will have a lot more feedback to give than the people who are content with your design decisions. The management and decision making was streamlined, so you only ever have a handful of choices to make and meta progression was added to ease the sense of loss. But, at the same time, the developers kept older unspoken mechanics and used symbols from the first game without explaining them in the sequel. Thus my theory, that Darkest Dungeon 2 is not an attempt to become more newcomer friendly, but rather an attempt to appeal to people who wished Darkest Dungeon 1 was more like Slay the Spire and in the process it became less like Slay The Spire and less like itself. In this manner, Early Access indies have mimicked the Triple-A design by committee homogenization that makes games feel a little too much like each other. 

But if the worst thing that can happen is I get more Slay the Spire clones for sequels then it’s not all that bad. Because, as we’re finding out with the success of BattleBit, crowdsourced design is remarkable in terms of hitting on the nostalgia that Triple-A walked away from. (I recommend watching the new Battlebit Design Delve if you’re curious how 3 indie developers were able to outdo Battlefield, one of the legendary FPS franchises, at their own game.) Meanwhile, Dice has been struggling to recover from their failed releases, because most of their efforts go into cannibalizing popular FPS trends and making sure you can spend money without too much hassle. Here’s the shop. Here’s the battle passes. Here’s the microtransactions. The heart and soul of the franchise will be patched in at a later date. Even though Battlefield: 2042 is struggling to find its footing with the reintroduction of its older features, other Triple-A publishers in charge of games like Cyberpunk 2077 are using a similar strategy to the Early Access programs to keep people waiting and drag people back into their messes. Reportedly the Phantom Liberty DLC will revamp the game into its “2.0” version, which is just fancy talk to say the game’s finally going to be what people were promised. Why should any triple-A game ever release in a finished state now?

It’s not about heart, intent, or morals. It’s about money, and the money shows that people are willing to pre-order unfinished games, QA test them for free, and market them for free. Because that’s what you’re doing if you’re buying into these unfinished Triple-A games. You’re an unpaid part of the development team now–being an alpha tester used to be free or a paid opportunity, now you’re paying 70 bucks for it and can’t even put it on a resume. I deserve to be at those office pizza parties. Why is this different from indie games in early access? Indie games are people pooling their money and resources to help smaller teams rise up. Triple-A in faux early access is like a billionaire going on welfare and eating up the resources intended for the less fortunate just to save a nickel. It’s the exact same concept twisted the wrong way.

So here we are, over 10 years later. Early Access has had its ups and its downs. Aside from the incredibly rocky false start, the indie game scene has benefited greatly from the concept. I look forward to seeing the games that continue to pool community resources to push themselves across the finish line. I wish I could say the same for Triple-A, but I’m anticipating a lot more games that deliver a mediocre release and then treat “2.0” patches as the real releases. Oh, and that quiz I promised you. There is no quiz. That’s the quiz.