22 months later or analysis of the Steam Early Access service

Good day, dear readers! We all know about a service such as early access to Steam. Someone has already used this service, and someone is trying to stay away from it. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the influence of Early Access on the video playing industry has already been manifested. 22 months have passed since its appearance, and I want to try to identify the trends that appeared in connection with the appearance of early access, and derive quantitative criteria for how to choose games from early access, if you have decided on it.

What is wrong (or so) with early Access?

A significant event in every sense took place on March 20, 2013. On this day, Valve launched the Early Access service at Steam, where developers could slowly finish their games with the help of their devoted community, which brought them money for their alpha, beta- or gamma version of the game (I remember the permanent Planetary Annihilation for sales start). The idea is excellent, but only if the developers will conscientiously fulfill their duties and release manufactured games at least in any decent time. An example of such games is just Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2. It is impossible not to mention Don’t Starve, Assetto Corsa and Spacebase DF-9. It is for the sake of such developers and such releases that there are Early Accesses.

However, what is the situation as a whole? On the very first day of the Early Access service, 12 games settled there, of which only five were released: Arma 3, Drunken Robot PornoGraphy, Starforge, Gearup and Kinetic Void. One of them (Patterns) generally ceased to exist. A good result for almost two years of work, is it so? Further even better. A little more than 22 months have passed since the launch of the service, as I already said. List of games available in Steam according to the EARLY Access scheme for 25.01.2015 has 349 games (there are really smaller ones: 240 pieces is if you do not take into account all kinds of DLC, packs for MMO games and so on), but early access left for the entire existence of its existence only 16 pieces. The difference is colossal! For 1 early access release, the game accounts for 15 pieces that are not a fact that they will see the light at least someday.

Yes, the number of releases from that’s what Early Access has increased lately (for example, exactly a year ago the number of games in the service was 54, and only 2 games were released). However, the number of developers using this system is also growing: only in January 2015 22 games took place in the service, and in December 2014 – 26. That is, over the past two months, exactly three times more games have appeared in early access than it came out of the service for 22 months of its functioning.

Now let’s look towards the long -standing of early access. Among them, one can note Starbound, which got into early access in December 2013, and Kerbal Space Program, which was one of the first 12 games in the early access. Both of these games are quite popular in Steam. Not one of me has a question for their developers: why it was impossible to finish the game in 1-1.5 years and release it? For example, the same “Divinity: Original Sin” appeared in early access in January 2014, and left “for gold” in June of the same year. As you can see, 5 months were enough to finalize the game, and Kerbal Space Program is not enough and 22. For this reason, one simple conclusion appears in my head: it is better, nevertheless, wait for the release of the game, than to cry later, that it has not been released for 3 years.

And if you really want?

Consider the situation when you saw a new game in Early Access and your eyes lit up, and your hands combed and reached for the wallet. Everything is very simple here. If there is a question: “To take or not take?” – it is natural to look at screenshots, videos and other charms. But do not forget about the two, although not the most objective, but important parameters. These are reviews in Steam and the frequency of updates (by the way, Steam speaks about this).

The first criterion should be perceived with a sufficient share of skepticism, since, for the most part, Steam reviews are often biased and engaged. But if there are more than 1-2 thousand, then statistics and the law of large numbers on your side. In this situation, various curators in Steam can still help.

As for the frequency of updates, it can be perceived as an indicator of how well the authors work on their project. The following fact was the discovery for me. Among the games that appeared in the early access until the beginning of 2015 and at the moment did not throw it out, nine projects did not have updates at all (for example, VOX, which appeared in early access in November 2013), and thirteen were updated less than once every two months.

Is there any correlation at all the correspondence between the imminent release of the game and the number of updates? It looks like there is. For example, the already mentioned Divinity: Original Sin was patted 4 times a month until it left Early Access, and Planetary Annihilation and Spacebase DF-9-a little more than three times a month. Now let’s look at the current state of affairs in the service itself: the weighted average number of updates for all games in Early Axess about three per month (therefore, most of the games are chatted less than once a week). I note that this number is an assessment from above, since part of the updates in the list is all kinds of announcements, rooadmap’s, etc. In reality, the desired number is close in two. Therefore, if the number of updates is higher than the average, then the game has someday to see the light significantly higher than that of brothers in misfortune. Here it is worth paying tribute, for example, the game Space Engineers, which the developers are patches, complement and update weekly, or even twice a week.

Therefore, the most correct, in my modest opinion, before buying the game in early access, will wait 1-2 months. Then you can check the fact that the game on which you laid your eyes was well and often updated (at least 1 time per week), read the reviews (which should be at least a thousand, and even better to make a decision to buy.