Fellow indie developers, want insider info of Early Access? Look no further. Our game @killsquadgame has been in Early Access for 6 months now on Steam (store.steampowered.com/app/910490/Kil…). So I think I can share with you the pros and cons of our experience. Share at will! Enter thread:
Our intent doing an EA was basically a Kickstarter on steroids: not only would we raise funding, but also gain a way to get feedback from the community and drive development forward. On Kickstarter, backers have nothing but hope. We gave them a game to evaluate. Did this work?
Short answer is MOSTLY. Killsquad has sold around 80.000 copies so far, do the math of how much funds we raised. Clearly, Killsquad is now being funded by the sales of its Early access, which is a positive thing. We have more than 200.000 Wishlists as well, quite happy also.
In terms of feedback, we have 1.5k reviews so far, average score of 65%, so YES, we did receive the feedback we wanted. Review content is now driving 100%
of our development efforts, so the "loop" we expected to build worked as intended. Does this mean all is great? Hell no!
of our development efforts, so the "loop" we expected to build worked as intended. Does this mean all is great? Hell no!
The first downside of this approach is, not everyone understood it. There's a culture that EA games are finished, only missing minor tweaking. But software development is a dynamic process, and part of our community came back with a "what? it's not finished yet?" message.
This led to significant anxiety / impatience. Again, maybe it affects 5% of our community, but truth is, gamers want the game HERE and NOW. And us telling them: "hey, we're using EA to raise funds and continue development, this will take 1 year" proved too much for some of them.
A second point I wanted to make is, EA makes road mapping more complex. Before EA, thought we knew what the game needed. And we stuck to our public plan. Once the game is out, there's many more opinions out there: there's Discord, Steam, forums... and you need to prioritize.
This may give the community a sense of chaos, as you change plans. For example, in Killsquad we published a 6 month roadmap. But as the game evolved, we decided some items were not as urgent, and followed the community in some requests. Handling this PR wise is complex.
A third thing we didn't plan well is rate of updates/PR beats. We had to learn how often we should update the game, and how to get media traction on our updates. Long story short: major outlets don't follow EA as much as we thought, so it's more about influencers & streamers.
We hired a specialist to help us improve the performance of our Steam page, and that worked well (hey @somniumlg that's you). And we hired a PR firm (@planofattackbiz) to generate PR buzz, which did work (but only during the release window). After that, you are on your own.
Seen in hindsight, we should have been more active on the streamer/influencer front. Food for thought for our next project. Another mistake we made is the localization. Early on, we said "ok, we will Early Access in all languages", so Killsquad supports about 10 languages today.
During EA, changes are frequent. And replicating those across 10 languages is a big problem. We've seen games EA'ing in English only (or with limited languages) and facing less issues on that front. So developers, be careful with the languages you choose.
The positive side is, YES the game did sell. YES we got the reviews we needed, and after storms and battles we've hit our stride. We'll be releasing a major update in a couple of weeks, and that should respond to a lot of comments from the community, mainly about variety.
The other side of EA which we didn't foresee is, a lot of people see your game. And that opens interesting conversations. So far, a 2nd project has spawned (based on a publisher IP), which we directly attribute to our Early Access. So EA can also be a platform for promotion.
My main concern is, we devs should talk more with one another. The same way these learnings may apply to you, I'm sure your learnings would have avoided some of our errors *if* we had spoken. That's the intent of this post: to foster discussion.
So if you're a dev doing EA, please respond and share. If you like the post RT & Like & Follow, so other devs see it and we can all benefit from this information. The industry will only grow for indies if we all make better business.
I don't know if they do it, but @Official_GDC should do an indie-centric event, to share cases and best practices. Having been to 18 GDCs so far, I suspect it would be as useful as popular. Just my two cents, please share, RT, follow & spread the word. And thanks for reading!
