Feature: Early Access, as told by the devs that live there

"Early Access" has become a four-letter word. Tales of alleged scams, abandoned or canceled projects and unfinished games being sold at retail have many questioning the service's validity and usefulness as a tool for empowering developers. Customers are increasingly concerned about quality assurance and Steam becoming a hot mess of unnavigable menus drowning users in content.

In light of this, Joystiq reached out to developers with varying histories regarding Early Access to find out more. Meet Jamie Cheng, Chris Simpson and Ryan Clark, your tour guides behind the scenes of Early Access indie development. Join us as these three developers share their thoughts on what has caused the downward spiral of public perception surrounding Early Access, what can be done about it, and what future – if any – the program has.

BEFORE EARLY ACCESS

"It's very dear to us, the idea of alpha funding," Chris Simpson of The Indie Stone told Joystiq. "To see its reputation kind of start to go down the toilet is very frustrating for us."

The Indie Stone is the studio behind Project Zomboid, one of Steam's first games to pass Greenlight certification, as well as one of the many games currently available on Steam Early Access. It's a game with troubled development history, but not for reasons of developer neglect or abandonment. Instead, it was outside forces that stirred up trouble for Simpson and his colleagues.

Piracy crippled the game during its pre-alpha release, a burglary in October 2011 left the team without a large amount of source code, and even when money started coming in from pre-release sales, PayPal froze the team's account due to the product not qualifying as a finished good. The Indie Stone was in a bad spot, but there was hope: Steam, Valve's digital store.

"Steam, especially back then, it was like the pot at the end of the rainbow," Simpson said. "It was something great to aspire to. So it was very important to us that we don't blow our one chance of, when we go on Steam, to make a good impression." The Indie Stone would be given that chance via Steam Greenlight, but it would be more than a year's time before the game actually made its way to the Steam store.

TOO EARLY ACCESS

Simpson told the story of another (unnamed) game, similar in concept to Project Zomboid, which was Greenlit at the same time. Where The Indie Stone opted to wait before releasing their game onto Steam, this other game released shortly after being Greenlit and received a huge backlash from the community for not being finished. Seeing such a negative reaction caused The Indie Stone to be cautious, and Simpson said the studio took the time refining their game to give it the best chance they could. Enter Early Access.

"It seemed like a gift from the gods because it allowed a small team to do something a bit more ambitious and exciting," Simpson said of the program. Indeed, Zomboid has had a successful Early Access run, with The Indie Stone building up a supportive community as it continues to develop the game. Lately however, it seems the gift is not what it once was, as public opinion of Early Access is turning negative.

"I think we'll be okay, I'm more concerned about the developers in a parallel dimension that just started Zomboid now and how different that experience would be and how much less likely I think they'd be to get where we are. That's what troubles me," Simpson said. "We wouldn't have been able to make this game without alpha funding, it's as simple as that."

THE NEW KID

Ryan Clark is the designer behind Crypt of the NecroDancer, a mashup of the roguelike and rhythm genres. Unlike The Indie Stone, he and his team did not have the benefit of being part of Early Access before its reputation soured. His game was released via Early Access on July 30, long after high-profile failures such as Earth: Year 2066 had turned customers skeptical.

"A lot of people were originally saying 'Why not Early Access? You get two launches and Steam promotion twice,'" Clark told Joystiq. But even with such potential benefits, he was nervous. "I knew there were lots of people out there who refuse to buy Early Access games just on principle because they've been burned or heard bad things. If it weren't for that stigma, you would Early Access any game that it made sense for. But since there is that stigma, you don't know that your Early Access is going to be any good."

Fortunately for Clark, his gamble paid off: Crypt of the NecroDancer hit number one on the Steam sales charts, and feedback from players has not only been positive, but useful in fixing bugs and tweaking the game. But even with so much uplifting buzz, the cloud hanging over Early Access can't be denied.

"It definitely seems like there's a lot of people telling us, 'This looks awesome but we're gonna wait and check it out later.' I imagine some of the [sales] tapering [off] must be because of that," Clark said. "We've had Reddit posts saying 'How do you know these guys aren't just scammers who are gonna stop developing the game now, cash in and just forget about us?'"

"It's shocking to me because I know there's no way I'm giving up on this. I love the game, I want to finish it and see it through, so it's weird to hear someone sort of ... accuse you of that. But it makes sense if it happened to them in the past."

MODERATION, CURATION, EXPERIMENTATION

Some industry voices have called for Valve to take a more active approach in what's allowed on its digital storefront to combat the flood of unfinished or low-quality games.

In a video titled "Cleaning Up Steam," which describes his frustrations with publishers releasing back catalogues onto Steam, TotalBiscuit argues that Valve actually already curates store content through what it features on the front page and how. "You might say 'Well, Valve shouldn't be curating,'" TotalBiscuit said. "Guess what? They already are. That's what Featured Items is. They already do curate. They just only curate in a very specific way. So you can't really argue for a full-on Valve hands-off approach."

In a video titled "Steam Needs Quality Control," Jim Sterling pushed the idea that, "A professional store should not be selling games like Takedown [Red Sabre], Guise of the Wolf or Revelations [2012]. It's shocking that these games are being sold upwards of $10 anywhere, much less a once-prestigious place like Steam." While Sterling's video was not directed specifically at Early Access, he mentioned the service as a contributing factor to Steam's damaged reputation.

"Trying to pick the Foul Plays and the Octodads out from among the Uneartheds, the Motor Rocks and the Garry's Incidents is becoming far more work than the consumer should have to put up with," Sterling said. "Things like Early Access are just making that harder, with developers tossing up far-from-finished alpha builds of games that get equally shown alongside finished titles."

However, the developers Joystiq spoke to leaned more toward putting control in the consumers' hands. "I think there's pros and cons to it all. I know that Valve wants to not have a heavy hand on things," Jamie Cheng, founder of Klei Entertainment, said. "You know, would they then have said, 'No Kerbal Space Program, you're not allowed on Early Access?' 'No Rust, it's too broken, so you're not allowed on Early Access.' And people love Rust. It's super fun. It may be broken, so what yardstick do you use? Because then it just becomes arbitrary. Either it's arbitrary or it's wrong. Or both."

He laughed. "Pretty much both."

A WORLD WITHOUT RULES

"Ultimately, it's about expectation-setting. If you set proper expectations, you're on your way," Cheng told Joystiq. "What everybody wants – well, maybe not the people who want to scam you – is for people to not regret their purchases. So you can buy a broken game and if you want to, play the broken game. It's just better that you know it's broken. The utopia would be that I both know that it's broken and that this game won't be finished; the developers are going to abandon it. And then people who want to buy into that can buy into that."

Simpson said that he believed the Steam community needs to grow, to develop a keen eye and instinct, and be careful about where they choose to put their money. However, since questionable – if not downright misleading – marketing practices can and have led to issues in the past, Simpson had another idea: make curation itself something Valve puts into the users' hands. He talked about the Steam store being more about what users think than what they spend money on.

"If something buggy goes up but no one ever sees it because the discoverability of the service is catered around things that are good or things that people like, not the things that sell well, but the things that everyone who plays it enjoys and recommends to other people," he said, "Maybe it doesn't matter if there's some really broken, unfinished, unplayable thing on Early Access."

Clark's position was similar: "It's possible in the future that reviews themselves – like the number of positive ones versus negative ones – might be used as a kind of rating metric," he told Joystiq. "Maybe using that review system might help. You could say this game has 98 percent positive reviews and 2 percent negative reviews. If that's the case for an Early Access game, you'd probably feel a little bit safer going for it."

"I think that's probably the only realistic way of doing it, outside of the sort of stuff that's always happened like press getting a preview and people making up their minds based on that."

MOVING FORWARD

Of course, while these ideas of developers and customers both getting what they want are nice, for now they're just that: ideas. For now, Clark, Cheng, Simpson and every other developer must play the field as it is, not as they wish it to be. And in a sea of negativity and increasing scrutiny, their best weapons are their games.

"I guess we feel this sort of shared responsibility because everyone's in that same space, everyone's got the same customers. So you've got responsibility to the consumers, but you've got responsibility to other developers who come after you or come around the same time. We're trying our best to be fair and responsible with it," Simpson said. "The indie community is about the games, it's not about the money."

Cheng was direct with his thoughts: "It's not rocket science, what we've been doing. It's simply that the more eyes we get on the game, the better we can make it," he said. He spoke about the release of Invisible, Inc. on Early Access, and sounded excited. He said he believed the game to be unique and interesting. "Now, does that translate into sales?" he asked. "I don't know. But we've based our entire company on the premise that if we create really interesting, compelling games, people will come and buy them."

Clark, the newcomer to Early Access, told Joystiq that not only was he torn between whether or not to release Crypt of the NecroDancer early, but those around him also gave conflicting views. "It was split down the middle," Clark said. "Half of [the developers I talked to] told me 'yeah you guys should totally do Early Access, your game's perfect for it,' and the other half were saying 'it's not what it used to be, I wouldn't risk it if I were you.' So it was a tough call."

In the end, it was concerns of quality, not money, that pushed Clark and his team to try Early Access."We wanted to do it because we knew the game would be better as a result," he said. Clark mentioned that sales of his game are tapering off more quickly than non-Early Access titles, and that it will be a challenge to market and sell his game twice. Even so, the feedback he and the team have gotten so far has proved invaluable, and Clark is happy to have that pro among all the cons.

"Early Access" has become a four-letter word. For some devs, that word is "risk," and it's one they're still willing to take.