‘Early Access’ is a term that might sting a lot of people’s ears when heard – and understandably so. It’s been accompanied with unfinished games, half-baked releases and buggy messes. In complete contrast to those descriptions, Hades II launched recently and has been met with near perfect critical acclaim – receiving a stellar 95 score on Metacritic and a perfect 10 from IGN. The most striking thing about the game is that’s been in early access for over a year. This trend of early access games has been rising in popularity and could become something very prominent in the future, especially when it comes to tearing down common industry misconceptions.

The traditional box product view of videogames has always been to ship out a brand new game, learn from its mistakes and iterate to develop a stronger sequel. That changed when patching became prominent in the late 90s to early 2000s, allowing developers to continuously update the game with fixes and improvements post launch. This feature eventually led to live service as we know it today - games that are released that receive extensive support via updates and additional content to sustain a large player base, such as Fortnite, Roblox or Overwatch. 

Then along comes the idea of ‘early access’, a system traditionally used by developers to receive feedback and quality data for multiplayer games before release, something that has recently been adopted for single player story games too. Notable examples include Path of Exile, both installments in the Hades franchise and the massive RPG Baldur’s Gate 3, with both Hades and Baldur’s Gate having received their fair share of laurels at award ceremonies. The curious thing is that they all launched with a fairly large amounts of content for their early access and just continued to add and build new systems on top of that, polishing the games to a brilliant shine. Additionally, feedback being driven directly into the games stirred up passionate communities that really felt appreciated and like they were directly contributing to making a game they already loved even better. This slow iteration builds so much excitement for the game and its full release that it completely snowballs into a hype train by the time the release window rolls around, inviting the wider gaming landscape to now try the perfected, final release of the game. The entire early access process, however, is eerily similar to another trend that other developers do.

Expansions are the other, more traditional form of “perfecting” a game after its release. It would be fair to say that the biggest trendsetters for launching game-sized expansions are FromSoftware and CD Projekt Red, with some of their expansions taking upwards of 40 – 60 hours to complete. Cyberpunk 2077, a game scorned for its awful launch, brought its reputation back from the dead by having constant updates for years and then inviting the wider gaming audience back with a neatly gift wrapped expansion at the end – Phantom Liberty – and it absolutely succeeded in reviving the narrative surrounding the game and studio as a whole. On the other hand, Elden Ring was one of the most acclaimed games of all time and yet they did the same, pushing constant updates and balances for years to then end it with the bold Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, cementing the game as an all-timer in game history. Both of these games illustrate what can be done with having post launch expansions, and their effect is not too far off from that of games doing early access now. The question to be asked for developers when choosing then should depend on how valuable they find the ‘first-time’ experience of the game to be, for Elden Ring the discovery and surprise of the game is crucial to the point where it could almost never be an early access game, but for Hades which is a procedurally generated roguelike game, a genre heavily focused on replayability, it proved to be a brilliant bet that payed off. 

The future seems to be steering towards more developers choosing early access to help raise funds and improve their games as much as possible before launch, but it won’t be completely replaced by the tradition of launching a game and supporting it with DLC. The decision to choose either should depend on the circumstances, indie developers might feel the need to raise funds and build trust for their game using early access, while AAA developers might already have a strong following and direction for their game and feel confident enough to have a full release followed by DLCs – either way, if done right, make for great games in the end.