Early access

Sell it before it's finished?

Picture an earlier Hyper Shards: three worlds working, two more planned, and testers already loving it. Kai asks: "Could we start selling it now, and finish the rest with players' help?"

Selling a playable but unfinished game is called early access. Players pay, play now, and watch the game grow. Many well-known indie games started this way. It comes with real rules, and real risks.

Steam Early Access: Valve's rules

Steam has an official Early Access program. Valve's rules at the time of writing:

• The game must be playable on the day people buy it. A tech demo is too early.
• A finished game doesn't belong there.
• It is not crowdfunding: players buy what exists now, not an idea.

The store page answers six questions: why Early Access, roughly how long, how the full version will differ, what state it is in now, whether the price will change, and how the community is involved.

Sell what exists, not promises

Another of Valve's rules: do not make specific promises about future events. Nobody can know exactly when a game will be finished, that it will be finished, or that a planned feature will definitely happen. Players should buy because of what the game is today.

So the studio writes "we plan to add two more worlds", never "two new worlds in March, guaranteed". And if an update will break save files, Valve says to tell players up front.

Early access pricing

Valve leaves the price to the studio, with a few rules at the time of writing:

• No higher than elsewhereThe Steam price must not be higher than on any other store or website, including our own.
• No permanent discountTo charge less during early access, set a lower base price instead of a never-ending sale.
• The 30-day gapAfter raising the price, no discount for 30 days. Raise it too close to 1.0, and you lose the launch discount.
• Say it up frontIf the price will go up at 1.0, tell players before they buy.

Rewards and risks

• Money while buildingSales help pay for the rest of development.
• Feedback from real playersHundreds of players find bugs and balance problems a small team would miss.
• First reviews stickReviews written during early access stay on the store page, labelled as early access reviews. A rough start keeps showing to future buyers.
• Never finishingSome early access games stall and are never finished, and the players who paid feel let down.
• Players expect updatesIf 12 months pass with no update, Steam adds a note to the store page saying the game hasn't updated in a while.

Phone test programs are different

Phone stores have test programs, not paid early access for everyone:

• TestFlight (Apple): free betas for up to 10,000 testers. Each build lasts up to 90 days, and purchases run in Apple's test mode, so nobody is charged.
• Google Play open testing: anyone can join from the store page. Feedback is private, and testers can't leave public reviews on the test version. Google also offers an early access track to select developers at the time of writing.

The Testers and review lesson covers these tracks in detail.

Leaving early access: 1.0

When the game is feature complete (everything planned is in), the studio presses Release in Steamworks. The Early Access label disappears, and players who wishlisted the game get an email. There is no going back to early access afterwards.

Along the way, a public roadmap shows players what is done, what is next and what is only an idea (the Public roadmaps lesson in Stage 9 shows how). Our plan: Hyper Shards launches finished, and early access stays an option for bigger future games.

Bolt says: Next lesson: Cloudflare, and a real web address for Hyper Shards.