For as long as I’ve been doing this – writing about games – I’ve avoided talking about games in Early Access. 

For those unfamiliar, Early Access is a community driven development style where developers sell an unfinished game, and solicit feedback from players to improve it. The term was originally coined by Valve in 2013 when they began officially supporting this development style through Steam. However, crowd-sourced game development long predates Valve or Steam.

Regardless, Early Access has a few major advantages over the more traditional route where you release a finished product after developing it behind closed doors. Namely, developers are able to partially fund development with the revenue they make during Early Access. This can be a huge lifeline for smaller studios that lack financial resources to sustain themselves over a protracted development cycle.

Additionally, Early Access allows studios to save money on quality assurance costs. An entire community of players actively playing a title can be a great asset for finding all manner of bugs, or unintended situations that arise when a game’s mechanics begin interacting. As such, Early Access can be a huge asset for teams with limited, or no quality assurance available for development testing.

Finally, Early Access also allows studios to more easily conduct playtesting. Normally this is a prohibitively expensive way to develop a game, but with Early Access you’ve naturally opened the door to a community of players who can provide feedback. Heck, heuristics can even be included in the game to collect data from less vocal players. This is invaluable as it can give developers a ton of insight into what is, and isn’t working about their game.

There might be a couple other niche benefits that I haven’t listed, but I think funding, QA, and playtesting represent the biggest advantages for developers using Early Access. The other key factor with Early Access that I haven’t yet mentioned is that it’s almost exclusively leveraged by smaller studios that can’t afford to do all of their development behind closed doors. By crowd-sourcing aspects of development, smaller studios can release much higher quality games than they’d manage in a completely isolated setting.

Fighting Megaera in Hades, a game that previously went through Early Access.

While Early Access sounds great, I’d argue that it had a rocky start. Obviously crowd-sourcing video game development predates Valve formalizing the process in 2013. Games like Dwarf Fortress were in development with players contributing to the public Alpha as far back as 2006. However, I’m not entirely certain many developers, or players even recognized that this was an option prior to Valve’s creation of Early Access. Unfortunately, this realization opened the floodgates for a lot of bad actors, which polluted the waters for the rest of us.

I still remember how when I first joined Steam, over a decade ago, I’d see a deluge of low quality titles littered across the front page of the store. These were games that appeared to be cobbled together in a few day’s time using store bought, place-holder assets. Each featured a detailed description about how they’d be the most feature rich game that you’d ever played, and would only charge 10 dollars for the privilege of playing. Invariably, these developers soon realized they bit off more than they could chew, and many of said games were abandoned without implementing even a fraction of what was promised.

With how commonly Early Access games were left to languish, they started to develop a bit of a negative reputation. A lot of them were viewed as scams, or were made the butt of a joke. Some pundits even used the deluge of low-quality titles as justification for calling upon Valve to implement some kind of quality control into Steam. This might be part of why Valve eventually implemented a refund policy on Steam, though (admittedly) I think pressure from the European Union was likely the biggest factor. Either way, this gave dissatisfied customers a method of recourse when they picked up a stinker.

Regardless, this perceived lack of polish is the first reason why I’ve refused to write about Early Access titles. I’m not sure if it comes across, but I don’t actually like talking about the technical shortcomings of a game. I’ve occasionally done so in the past, but I much prefer to focus on what a game is actually trying to do, and whether or not it succeeds. As such, I’ve always found it easier to simply avoid Early Access titles so I didn’t have to subject myself to a game while it’s potentially at its worst.

However, I do think that Valve has done a lot to change the negative perception of Early Access in recent years. I don’t know exactly when, but Valve got very big into AI well before it became the buzzword of the Tech industry. They’ve been leveraging an almost fully automated recommendations system across the whole of Steam for years now. This shows every single customer a personalized version of Steam with products that they might be interested in buying. It’s not perfect, but the system has done a great job of burying the sorts of Early Access titles that used to paint the whole of Early Access in a negative light.

Fighting Lagavulin with the Ironclad in Slay the Spire, another successful Early Access game.

In addition, a number of high profile Early Access success stories have broken over the past several years. Games like Darkest Dungeon, Don’t Starve, Subnautica, Rimworld, Slay the Spire, and Hades all spring to mind when I think of Early Access now. The developers behind these games, and many more, have leveraged Early Access to make fantastic games, which has generated a ton of positive sentiment for the once maligned development process.

I’m not immune to being persuaded by shifting public opinion, so even I decided to start checking out Early Access titles again. I haven’t played many of them, but I rather enjoyed the time I spent playing Valheim with my significant other. It’s the sort of thing that I wouldn’t have entertained the idea of playing 5 years prior because I assumed that all Early Access titles weren’t worth my time.

Though, I have another uniquely me problem when it comes to Early Access: these games are in a constant state of fluctuation. This means that there can be a lot of change across a game’s Early Access period. As such, writing about interesting aspects of the game’s design can feel a bit self-defeating because they might be removed, or altered in future updates. That could cause several hours of my work on an article to go down the drain, which…just fucking sucks. There’s no other way to cut it.

However, recently I’ve felt like massive game updates aren’t the exclusive realm of Early Access, which was actually the catalyst for this article. For example, I’ve played Guilty Gear Strive across 3 of its 4 seasons. In each season, developer Arc System Works has added a handful of new characters, while altering the game’s system mechanics. In the most extreme examples of these changes, characters have had their combo routes altered to the point where they felt completely different to play. As such, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say Guilty Gear Strive is a completely different game from what originally launched back in 2021.

Fighting Ramlethal Valentine in Guilty Gear Strive as May.

It’s not just games with seasonal content drops either: single player, and offline games also receive updates of this scale. Earlier this year, I decided to pop back into Wildfrost. Turns out, in the time since I last played it, Wildfrost received 2 major updates. These updates completely rebalanced the majority of the game’s minions, while also revamping the game’s difficulty. It genuinely felt like I was playing the game for the first time because of how much had changed, and I had a ton of fun piloting new deck types that were introduced as part of these updates.

With all that in mind, I’m not entirely sure I see the point in abstaining from writing about Early Access titles anymore. I’ve covered several other games beyond the 2 examples I listed above that have updated numerous times over their lifetime. How would that be any different from writing about a game in Early Access? It seems to me that the only difference is that the developers of Early Access titles are promising to continue working on and updating a game, while the updates I’ve played for other games were simply a pleasant surprise.

Perhaps then it is finally time to start playing more Early Access titles, and subsequently writing about them. There’s no short supply of promising titles that have been released this year into Early Access like Cataclismo, Hades II, and Ender Magnolia. I’m really failing to see how future updates to those games are functionally different from seasonal content drops, or massive balance patches. It might finally be time to engage with Early Access titles on the same level as every other game that I play.

How about you?  Where do you stand on Early Access? Have you also had to reevaluate your stance over the past several years? Let me know as I’m highly curious about the experience that others have had with regard to this topic.