How to Successfully Take Your Game Into Early Access

Surviving, succeeding, and avoiding the pitfalls of early access games

Early Access in the right hands can be one of the most effective strategies for developing a game for an indie developer. When it goes right, you can earn a profit on a game while still making it and raising awareness for your game at the same time. Not only that but you can get free playtesting and a live reaction from your market about your game, which is worth its weight in gold. But just like with Kickstarter, the days in which you could fumble through and still reasonably succeed are over. Today, I’m going to talk about how you approach making an early access game work.

What Early Access Means

Before we get to the main topic, for people who don’t know what we’re talking about with early access today, here is a brief primer. Since Valve added the option, early access is the option to release a game while in development for people to buy and play in whatever version the developer has made available. The idea is that consumers get to play and help influence the game’s development, and the designers are earning money to help support the game while getting feedback.

That feedback is huge for designers, and studios like Klei Entertainment have been…