Early Access Is The New Norm, And That's Not A Bad Thing (2024)

I love Project Zomboid. It’s been in early access since 2013. Updates are few and far between, often with lengthy two or three year-long gaps between sizable content added to the game. In its place stands a robust modding community - one of the best of any game on Steam, and I’ll argue that until I’m red in the face - and a communicative and reliably stubborn yet small development team at The Indie Stone, who refuse to crunch, and follow the mantra that good things come to those that wait.

Build 42 is on the horizon, which appears to be an enormous update with an engine overhaul, the introduction of NPC animals (I will defend my cows against the zombie horde until the end of time), and new basem*nts and skyscrapers.

The anticipation I have for this update is like nothing else—it’s not like waiting for a new game, which might turn out to be a complete and utter failure (I should’ve seen it coming with The Day Before), because I already know what Project Zomboid is. I’ve already spent several hundred hours in the game, and regardless of whether the update meets my expectations or not, I will spend several hundred more.

Last year’s greatest success story, Game Of The Year winner Baldur’s Gate 3, spent three years in early access. During this time, the game was changed and tweaked with feedback from a dedicated community. It was released when it was ready, and according to many developers I chatted to at Gamescom 2023 and beyond, the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 only cemented how important early access is to releasing a fully fledged game. Keep your dedicated community happy, and they’ll return the favour by trial-and-erroring your game all the way to greatness.

Enshrouded, one of my favourite games of 2024 so far, launched to a positive reception, but was ultimately overshadowed by Palworld. Despite this, and after chatting with the team at Keen Games last year at Gamescom, I see Enshrouded as a perfect blank canvas for future updates. It’s clear this is a long-term project, and that early access is only the start. They’ve put out a poll on their forums that lets players vote on their most requested features for future updates.

In a recent presentation and developer co-op session of upcoming survival game, Nightingale, Inflexion Games CEO Aaryn Flynn said that “developing games in early access is exciting”, that there’s “nothing like it”, and that this is the “modern” way to develop games. Early access allows developers to hear what their players want directly. It’s a fine balancing act, of course, because despite what the players might say or want, they’re not always right. A lot of the time they are, but not always. Nightingale will be launching into early access with a lower price point than its full 1.0 release, which should be the norm going forward.

Many other popular games have spent long periods in early access, including Slay The Spire, Subnautica, Ark, Prison Architect, and Darkest Dungeon, to name just a few. But for all the winners, there are also losers. Many games have wallowed and eventually died in early access. I’m going to mention Valheim here but even I can admit I’m being a little harsh: the game is far from dead, with the highly-anticipated Ashlands update hopefully just on the horizon, but there’s no denying that player expectations for the promised content roadmap launched with the game have been slashed to pieces.

There are also the classic early access failures, like Spacebase DF-9, a space simulator developed by Double Fine that completely collapsed in early access almost a decade ago—it was unplayable at launch, and was basically never fixed. We haven’t seen anything fail quite as spectacularly as Spacebase DF-9 for some time, but never say never.

It’s likely we’ll instead see many, many more success stories in the coming years, with even triple-A studios opting for the early access route as Larian Games did with Baldur’s Gate 3. There’s always going to be push and pull from gamers - they want a full game for the price of a full game, completely understandable, but they also want developers to change and update their product according to what they want. Early Access provides the perfect middle ground, but it has to be handled properly.