This is my 3rd and Final Early access data deep dive where I look at the games that have had an early access release on Steam. Here is part 1 where I wondered how many games participate in EA and part 2 where I estimated how well you will do with your full launch based on your Early access launch.
I wanted to look at a few more random questions that didn’t fit into the other two articles:
- How long are games typically in Early access?
- How often are prices changed in the middle of early access?
- How much are prices increased and how often are they decreased?
- Does changing the price impact the review scores?
Reminder: What games am I looking at in this survey?
As with my other articles, I used VGInsights to look across all Early Access games that have been released since the start of the 2014 debut of the Early Access program on Steam.
For all the survey data below I filtered out games that had fewer than 10 reviews because those are typically hobbyist games or asset flips (any time I post median sales numbers there is always some guy that says “I bet those are just hobbyist games bringing down the average.”)
I also am only looking at games that have entered Early Access and Exited early access. I am specifically trying to find data on how games fare throughout the Early Access process instead of just entering it.
Also before we get into it, here is a short definition of some terms:
If I say “Early Access Launch” that means the date the game can be purchased
If I say “1.0” that means Early Access games that have done their full release.
How long are games typically in Early Access
Average (Mean): Approximately 399.03 days
Median: 260 days
Does it matter how long a game is in Early Access? No! The correlation between % positive reviews and EA duration was 0.0162 meaning there was none.
So take all the time you need but don’t think going longer with your development is going to make it better.
How often do games change price during Early Access?
- Average Price Change: Approximately $5.82
- Median Price Change: $4.00
- Standard Deviation: Approximately $10.43, suggesting that the price changes have a fairly wide spread around the average.
Biggest Price Decrease?
Sceelix – Procedural Power which was $75 and then went free before exiting Early Access. Surprisingly nobody left a bad review about that, just a bunch of Linux fans saying that it didn’t support Linux.
Biggest Price Increase:
$129.99
VBOX Sim which allows you to analyze your racing game performance as if you are a pro driver. It only has 7 reviews.
Does increasing price hurt their review positivity?
I looked at all the games that changed the price during EA (both up and down) and wondered if you increase your prices does the % positive of reviews change. There is a very very slight correlation between an increase in price and a decrease in % positive reviews: −0.2253.
It is very minor. So you be the judge. I don’t know it kind of seems like you can get away with increasing your price and not getting penalized for it. I think indies should always be increasing their price.
Cool tip
In all my surveys, someone shared this tip.
Your first 5 tags you pick are the most important because Steam weighs them more heavily when trying to match your game to others.
If you do not pick “Early Access” for any of your 20 tags, then Steam automatically puts it right up front like this game:
That isn’t great because gamers don’t really go out looking for Early Access games. Similarly your game is going to have a harder time matching up to similar games.
So the tip here if you have an EA game is to be sure to add the EA tag when going through the tagging wizard BUT move it all the way to the last position in the list.