Interview: Early Access, the changing landscape of indie game launches, and the return of the demo

‘Steam Next Fest single-handedly brought demos back on the radar.’

Box Dragon / Guidelight Games / Little Leo Games / Shiny Shoe

The concept of Early Access launches has become a mainstay in modern gaming, especially in connection with indie games – and there are brilliant examples of it working out: Hades, Against the Storm, and Slay the Spire are some of the gems produced by Early Access done right.

At the same time, people are starting to tire of paying for incomplete games and waiting for the latest updates that may or may not contain what they’ve been hoping for. Many indie developers, too, are beginning to steer away from what has almost seemed like an obligation to release into Early Access.

“The whole landscape of prepping for your game launch is wildly different than five years ago, and that’s when a lot of Early Access titles were popular,” developer Kevin Chang tells me during a roundtable discussion with a group of developers active in the roguelike deckbuilder genre. Chang is the game director at Box Dragon, a studio located in the Swedish town of Göteborg, which is currently developing a roguelike deckbuilder called As We Descend – and the small team must soon decide which route to take: Early Access, yay or nay?

As We Descend is currently undergoing a closed playtest. / Box Dragon / Coffee Stain Publishing

“You really want Early Access to be your launch,” Chang says. “The experience in your Early Access game should be as good as in a launch title – it might be missing a little bit of content, or a little bit of polish, or a little bit of balance, but it’s really got to be there. [...] You can’t change too much, because then the player base gets salty and they get really upset about all the stuff they bought into and you’re now changing. Maybe they loved that one thing.”

Restricted flexibility isn’t the only consideration in regards to Early Access, though. An aspect we often overlook from the outside is the sheer amount of additional time an Early Access launch is sapping away from small development teams. SpellRogue is a roguelike deckbuilder currently in Early Access and made by Guidelight Games – a two-person team. One of the two co-founders, Thorbjørn Nielsen, relays his experience: “Just managing our Discord and answering Steam forum questions is a huge extra task that we have to manage now and it’s just so important to answer people’s questions and be there.”

“I don’t know if it’s worth it. Maybe if we were super famous.”

“I stopped replying on the forums for a bit because of my burnout and it felt like the game was abandoned for a month. I felt so bad. It’s hard,” Leonardo Castanho, game designer at Little Leo Games adds. Castanho and his team decided not to go with an Early Access model for Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles, their roguelike deckbuilder from 2023, after long deliberation. He says it was a fortunate choice because Astrea was already out when his burnout kicked in – that would have been a much bigger problem had the game been in Early Access at the time.

“I don’t know if I would do it in the next game, because of the amount of resources and energy you have to put into it,” Castanho explains. “I don’t know if it’s worth it. Maybe if we were super famous and we knew that people would jump in and create a community.”

Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles is getting a console release date soon and a major balance patch is inbound as well. / Little Leo Games / Akupara Games

Mega Crit, the developer behind Slay the Spire, already announced that the sequel would use an Early Access model as well – though it’s far from a necessity. “They have everything they need,” the Brazilian developer says. While the studio is not depending on the revenue generated by the early sales, Castanho explains that the move still makes sense in his mind due to the studio’s “faithful audience” – something less well-known developers can’t count on.

Nielsen emphasizes that it feels amazing to get the game out and have people play it, especially in regards to earning some revenue and gathering additional feedback, but agrees with Chang’s point about the model restricting development. “As soon as you have the game out, there will be people that complain about every change you make, especially if you remove content or redesign mechanics,” he says. “We’ve definitely felt a bit burnt by Early Access, just from the backlash we can get from the updates.” Nevertheless, Nielsen is “still positive about Early Access.”

“It’s a launch that a certain percentage of players will ignore.”

Andrew Krausnick, the game director at Shiny Shoe, has been on both sides of the fence: 2020 roguelike deckbuilder hit Monster Train, which has just arrived on PS5, was not an Early Access title, but the studio’s follow-up, Inkbound, used the model before hitting 1.0 in April 2024. He says that the team has “mixed feelings” about it.

“You need to treat it like launch, but it’s a launch that a certain percentage of players will ignore, because they’re like ‘Oh, I’ll just wait for the 1.0 update that they’ll definitely do’, and you’ve got to sign up to definitely do it, because you can’t put out something in Early Access and then be like ‘Oh, nevermind, it didn’t land with an audience’ or whatever,” he says. “So you’re committed and people wait for that big update you’re definitely doing. But at the same time, everyone who buys it pays money for it and they expect a game. You want to give them a game, that’s why you’re doing it.”

Krausnick names Hades as a great example of an Early Access title providing players with its core experience right from the start without making them feel like they’re missing all too much. However, he notes that roguelike deckbuilders don’t have the same luxury, because they don’t have a story they can deliver as the final piece of the puzzle for an impactful 1.0 update.

For many genre enthusiasts Monster Train ranks among the category's best titles alongside Slay the Spire. / Shiny Shoe / Good Shepherd Entertainment

“You want to get that big launch, because there are so many games out there,” he explains. “There’s a lot of competition out there. You’re trying to break through that with your launch and anything that doesn’t help you punch through the noise is kind of holding you back a little bit.”

“It’s a lot harder to answer that question now as a developer than it was a while ago, when Early Access was a bit more Early Access – more like a beta, more like trying this thing out. And now there are higher expectations for it and there’s a lot of competition out there,” Krausnick says.

Castanho reports that his team thought about releasing the game piecemeal after basically being done with it, scheduling regular content updates with the remaining characters to essentially mimic Early Access development, though the idea ended up being scrapped.

“I think there is a universe where that makes sense,” Chang comments, “but I think it’s as Andrew said, you want your 1.0 to head towards something more explosive. People love new characters, but is it 1.0 good?”

“Steam Next Fest single-handedly brought demos back on the radar.”

He agrees that the standards for Early Access launches have really shot up over the years and this, in turn, made aspects like beta tests much more important once again – which is why As We Descend is currently running a playtest you can join through the official website.

“Steam Next Fest is such a huge thing,” Chang elaborates. “People were not talking about demos four years ago. Steam Next Fest single-handedly brought demos back on the radar. Everyone’s talking about demos now because Steam forces you to have one to be on Steam Next Fest and you get so much visibility for doing so.”

He continues: “But you want your demo to be really good, so you have to do a beta or a playtest with just internal people, so you don’t just put some rough demo out there and people are like ‘Wow, your demo sucks, I’m not going to buy your game.’”

SpellRogue recently got a big update, changing up quite a few aspects of the game. / Guidelight Games / Ghost Ship Publishing

“I think that’s a good point,” Krausnick nods. “Demos are almost a replacement to some degree for some of that initial Early Access stuff. I played the demo of Balatro six months before it came out and thought ‘This is gonna be great,’ but it felt like before when Early Access games would come out and they would be a little under the radar and get worked on and then be really polished.”

Aside from being a marketing tool, demos can help developers learn and give them a chance to change things drastically without having to put up with a stream of criticism, he points out – after all, no one paid money for the game yet. It’ll be interesting to see how Steam’s recent efforts to give demos more visibility will impact this development as well.

Though Early Access continues to be popular, the developers’ debate around the pros and cons shows that change may well be inbound – but as always, such a shift will not happen from today to tomorrow.