Early Access Advice
Hey Guys
We're planning to put one of our games on Steam through the Early Access program, and was just wondering if you guys had any advice on the whole early access thing and what makes a successful one.
Thanks
Gavin
Tasty Poison Games
We're planning to put one of our games on Steam through the Early Access program, and was just wondering if you guys had any advice on the whole early access thing and what makes a successful one.
Thanks
Gavin
Tasty Poison Games
Comments
1. Emergent gameplay is super important. If your game is always the same, early access might be worse for it than doing dedicated feedback and pre-orders based on teasers with no playable beta. There have to be incentives for players to explore your game over and over again, the more impact you can get out of adding 1 piece of content, the better. Emergent systems are great for this.
2. Have an update schedule and stick to it. Make your updates events and really up the performance aspect of it all. If this means you can only afford to update once a month, that's fine. Never put your update time on a monday, your weekends will die.
3. Make sure your community has somewhere to nucleate. The whole point of early access is to build a community of superfans around your game, you need a place for them to call home, a place to collect their feedback and a place for them to help new players. Set up your own wiki if the game supports it, run your own forums. Yes, Steam's community stuff is pretty cool and you should totally monitor it, but owning your community is much better long term. Support the stuff your community produces and it'll produce more.
4. Don't think your game isn't done yet, so you should make it cheaper! You're collecting superfans, these are the people that value your game and what you're doing MORE than anyone else is likely to. You have to repay their attention by making them feel as special and appreciated as they actually are: Just lowering the price of your game doesn't do that at all, it devalues everything and says you're just trying to get cash out of people early; Offer them extra instead.
5. Don't try to go early access as your game's only PR. Similarly, don't try to sell your game before people are telling you they want to pay you for it! Loads of people bought DD pre-orders based simply on how much they enjoyed the free alpha. We made the beta open for everyone to play when we were demoing the game at events. I don't think we were particularly good at either of these things, but we did get lucky a few times.
6. This is not a beta, don't leave your game broken. You're offering something of value to players, that means that you can't break your game for a week and just leave it like that. People will forgive bad polish and nasty menus, they won't forgive broken core gameplay and bug-riddled play sessions. If there's progress in your game, try not to break your player's saves or wipe their progress, that's a big chunk carved out of your community every time it happens.
7. Early access is not a launch. You'll only get a sales spike if there's already buzz for your game, don't expect it to be a financial injection - early access is a long game and the more you work at it, the more you grow and nurture your community, the more you'll snowball players. Getting press while in early access is tricky, you have to be super remarkable, otherwise you're simply going to not get any attention when you launch (which is when you really want it) the story should always be about how useful early access is to you design-wise, or some neat thing your community discovered - never push the story of your game simply existing.
8. Don't get stuck in early access! If your campaign is successful, it can be really rewarding to keep adding things to the game - I mean, why not? You're earning money for it, it's fun design work, everything's going great, right? Except you're probably neglecting the less rewarding stuff. At some point you'll have to sit and polish the game, your community will probably hate this, your new sales will go down, you'll lose players. You still have to do this to release the game and it'll feel like crap compared to the dopamine rush of having players chomping at the bit to see what you've added this week.