I’m a bit of a heretic, because I think that a game should be released when it’s done.
Indie devs don’t live in an ideal world and I have a hell of a lot of patience for them. They’re the perfect candidates for early access because it lets them get a bit of money coming in before final release, plus free QA testing.
But I have absolutely zero patience for “triple A” studios who throw breathtaking amounts of money at a project only to release a buggy mess for the sole reason of hitting an arbitrary deadline they dreamed up, and call it “early access”.
Intuitively it always seemed like there was a sweet spot. Too short a period and there’s not enough time to build hype or (more importantly) fix the issues revealed by Early Access. Too long a period and people forget about your game, and EA players got everything they wanted out of it before launch, so have little reason to come back and boost visibility w/ player numbers.
It’s nice to have some hard data to back this up and put an objective measure on where that sweet spot is.
I feel like Abiotic Factor did a really good job with this. It released last summer into EA, then over that next year they released chunks of the game, sort of like as the story was unfolding, until the full game was finally done back in June. Then they upped the price by $10, but not before putting it on sale again for the 1.0 release.
Makes sense to me, I’ve long believed that games shouldn’t be announced more than 6 months from release
Yet another Ark?
