Should you do Early Access? – How To Market A Game

This post is Part 1 of my series of articles looking Early Access. To read part 2 all about Estimating EA success based on your EA launch numbers, click here.

People always ask me, should I do Early Access? For first time developers, I almost always said no. Just release it in full. But it was just my gut level intuition telling me that. But I hate my gut. So I decided to run some numbers and figure out how good or bad Early Access is.

So after running the numbers, I have to admit, I may have been wrong about Early Access, it might secretly be great.

Here is a quick example. These are the numbers for all games released since 2019:

Release type	Average estimated revenue	Median estimated revenue	Average number of reviews	Median number of reviews	Average Steam Rating
Normal launch	$360,000	$613	711	14	72%
Early Access	$263,937	$847	676	14	69%
1.0	$523,000	$2847	1287	35	75%

A short history of Early Access

On March 20, 2013, Valve announced Early Access which was a program that allowed developers to launch (and sell) a game before it was 100% complete so that developers could create the game with their community.

There are two big benefits:

A game that is in Early Access has 2 launches. The first is an Early Access launch when the game first becomes available, then a second launch when the game is “complete.”
The developer starts to get paid while the game is in development. One of the worst things about this industry is games take a long time to make, and you don’t get paid until the very end and most of your money comes in one giant spike.

Quick terminology review that I will be using for the rest of the blog

EA: Games that have gone on sale as part of Early Access I refer to as “EA.” Note, I am never referring to Electronic Arts. EA means the game can be purchased but it is under the Steam Early Access program which means it has not fully launched.
1.0: Games that have an EA launch and then release fully I will refer to as “1.0.” So when you see me say “A game had it’s 1.0” that means the game was posted for sale as part of EA, and then some period of time later released fully.
Normal Launch: Games that were never part of the Early Access process I call “Normal Launch.” This is just launching. These games were just launched and that was it.

Early access started in March of 2013 but really the first games were released in 2014. Here is a graph with the history of games released each year in early access:

Since 2014 there have been over 10549 games that have participated in the Early Access program (Either stuck in EA or gone full 1.0).

As a percentage of total games released on Steam, the following graph shows that it swelled to 20% in 2017 through 2020 but has dipped a tiny bit recently.

How many games go full 1.0?

In the early days of Steam Early Access, developers abused the system and treated it almost like a Kickstarter, or a way to throw an idea out there to see if it was worth developing.

As you can see from the following chart, from 2014-2017 a LOT of crap was thrown into Early Access that was never developed further. For instance, in 2016 90% of EA games, never released to 1.0. For the most part the games were abandoned, but not all. For instance Project Zomboid EAed in 2013 but has never 1.0ed despite continuous content updates.

For the most part though, those quick flip EA games in the first 4 years really soured the Steam audience and gave EA the reputation it has today.

From a purely qualitative research perspective, you can see the sentiment toward those early 2016 games.

I was young and foolish when I bought this “game” Thanks to this game I no longer bother with early access games. **** game, important lesson.

Abandoned and unfinished. Early supports paid $16 to support the game and now the devs have dropped the ball, dropped development, and dropped the price to 99 cents to make a few pennies as they run off into hiding. Developers like this is why Early Access has a bad reputation.

Side note for this chart and all the following charts, when EA games transition to 1.0, the percentage is counted for the year it originally EAed. For instance, Brotato EAed in 2022 but 1.0ed in 2023. Therefore, it is counted as part of the (red) 25% of games that 1.0ed in 2022. That means that yes, 90% of 2016 games NEVER went 1.0.

You will also notice that 2021 and 2022 have relatively fewer 1.0 releases. I figure that is mainly because those games are still under development. But I am 99% sure that those 2014 EA games are never going to 1.0.

Early Access turnaround

You will notice from the chart that in 2018 the number of EA games that went 1.0 stepped up quite a bit. Why? Right around 2018 Valve changed the algorithm to stop the shovelware that was invading their system. Their solution was to greatly increase the visibility for games that earned more money. It worked. Shovelware games get almost no visibility. However, many small-time indies get buried under the new more difficult algorithm. My theory is that shovelware companies realized it wasn’t worth doing this.

Because of this algorithm shift, for the rest of this blog I am going to only look at data from 2019 and beyond because there has been a clear shift in how the audience and developers are treating EA games.

Is Early Access worth it?

This is the ultimate question: would it be better if you launched your game straight up or tryed the Early Access to 1.0 launch strategy?

Here is the data for all release types since 2019

Release type	Average estimated revenue	Median estimated revenue	Average number of reviews	Median number of reviews	Average Steam Rating
Normal launch	$360,000	$613	711	14	72%
Early Access	$263,937	$847	676	14	69%
1.0	$523,000	$2847	1287	35	75%

Amazing! It actually seems that you do much better if you do the full Early Access experience than if you do just a normal launch.

Now, note the difference between the values in the Average and Median columns. Steam Really really favors the winners which is why the average is SOOOO much higher. Typically I don’t use Average for revenue summary.

Also, most games never get more than 10 reviews which is what people typically call “hobbyist” developers who aren’t serious about making this a full time career and consider releasing a game a bucket list goal. So I re-ran those numbers but only for games that earned at least 100 reviews.

(Note there is nothing magic about 100 reviews, I just picked a nice round number.”)

(Second side note: I think it is really hard to distinguish between hobbyists and part time developers, but people on Twitter and Discord always say “well they are probably just hobbyists bringing down the average” so I do it for you people who cry “HOBBYIST!!!”).

Release type for games >100 reviews	Average estimated revenue	Median estimated revenue	Average number of reviews	Median number of reviews	Average Steam Rating
Normal launch	$1,900,000	$43,500	3,709	369	82%
Early Access	$1,300,000	$62,828	3,200	372	78%
1.0	$1,600,000	$77,000	3,900	486	80%

When I strip the data down to just the “real” games it is a little more ambiguous as to whether the Early Access or the Normal launch path is better.

Why is a 1.0 launch slightly better than a Normal Launch?

I have a couple theories as to why EA does better than a normal launch.:

First, Early Access games get a second email blast to wishlisters. For a normal launch, regardless of discount, every person who wishlisted the game gets an email that says “A game you wishlisted has been released.” For early access games, there is the email blast at EA launch, but another email blast when the game goes 1.0. This is just free visibility.

Secondly, EA games are probably better polished and the community is stronger, so when the game goes 1.0, it is more likely to show up in New & Trending and there will be fewer bugs that turn people away.

Third, Survivorship bias. So if a game totally bombs at EA launch, many developers just abandon the project. As you can see from this chart, the MAJORITY of games never make it out of Early Access. Therefore all the 1.0 games we are seeing are games that did well enough that the developer thought it was worthy of finishing.

So what’s the downside?

So why doesn’t every game just do Early Access? What’s the problem?

The downside is the Steam customers.

Early Access still has that reputation for being a sort of dumping ground for half-formed ideas. The suspicion is that developers will “abandon” their game and the shoppers paid $20 and got a half-finished game. I can’t blame them. Look at what happened in 2014-2018.

As a result, Steam shoppers have become very very suspicious of EA games. If you launch into EA you will pretty soon get a barrage of questions like

“Where is that update?”

“Is this a dead game?”

“Why haven’t you pushed a build? It has been 8 days since your last build! This game must be dead”

Basically when you launch an EA game you have added a second job which is official community babysitter. You have to constantly reassure your customers that you are still here, still working on your game.

Once you do EA, you can no longer hide away from the world while you tinker away at your precious game in solitude. You have now signed up for mandatory, frequent, community management. Expect to do a lot of dev blogs, manage your discord, and push updated code at a frequent interval.

Why I was so suspicious of EA

I see EA like quick sand. If you don’t navigate your initial EA launch carefully, you are stuck: no sales, bad reviews, and those people who did buy it are constantly asking “where is my update? Why haven’t you updated your game? It has been 3 days!”

If things go poorly, this is a very dangerous situation because you are now chained to this game that is clearly a dead weight: it isn’t finished, you were hoping that the EA release and subsequent sales would fund the rest of the game. But, it didn’t work out. Now you have a game that flunked its launch, your fans are angry, and you are questioning whether it is worth continuing development on this game. This is a very bad situation and your options are:

Just abandon the game. The downside is that if you start a new game people will say “HEY IT IS THAT PERSON WHO DIDN’T FINISH THAT GAME! SHAME! SHAME!”
Just try and just wrap it up quickly and do a 1.0 launch. The downside is that people will say “THIS GAME IS BUGGY AND TOO SHORT”
Spend a lot of money out of your own pocket on a game that has proven to have missed the market and therefore a money sink.See the perils of the sunk cost and opportunity cost. Sure you might finish it, but you will have spent a lot of your money.

Summary

So if you can manage to get your game to a 1.0 release it seems there is some slight increase to your game’s visibility.

Basically I think of the EA path as high risk, and slightly higher reward. If you screw up your launch into EA, or your game turns out to be a bomb, you could be shackled to a game that isn’t worth spending more time and money on to get it to its 1.0 launch. This will hurt your reputation and finances.

Back in 2014 when EA first was announced, Valve held a roundtable with developers who found success in the program (video linked below). One of the recommendations was, you should never choose the Early Access route because of money. The scenario they caution against is where your financial runway has ended and the game isn’t done, and you hope that the Early Access release will fund the rest of development. That strategy won’t work. EA will more than likely fail and you will be left with a dead game stuck in EA quick sand.

The second trap that I see developers get stuck in is they don’t realize that the game’s EA launch is their launch. You still need to get ~7000 wishlists, you still need to try to get in popular upcoming. You still need to try your best during Steam Next Fest. Don’t do an EA launch because your visibility is flat and you hope that an EA launch will improve your game’s marketing. It will not. EA Launch is the culmination of your visibility, not a catalyst.

Also don’t do EA because you just want to get some feedback on your game. So many developers tell me “I decided to do EA because I just wanted to see what people thought, I thought it would be a good trial.” This is a BIG mistake and has killed many games. You basically, purposefully dove head first into the quick sand. If you want feedback, just run a beta, do some user tests, put out a demo. DON’T do EA because you need “feedback.”

There is a lot more to Early Access and will be dedicating the next several posts to looking at this issue. Here is what I want to cover in the future.

How much of a boost do games get when they transition from EA to 1.0?
How long do games typically spend in EA?
How do developers do price changes in EA? Do they increase them at 1.0? Do they price high first?
How often are EA games updated, How many posts are created?
Genre, what games should do EA?

To read part 2 all about Estimating EA success based on your EA launch numbers, click here.