Intuitively it always seemed like there was a sweet spot. Too short a period and there’s not enough time to build hype or (more importantly) fix the issues revealed by Early Access. Too long a period and people forget about your game, and EA players got everything they wanted out of it before launch, so have little reason to come back and boost visibility w/ player numbers.
It’s nice to have some hard data to back this up and put an objective measure on where that sweet spot is.
I feel like Abiotic Factor did a really good job with this. It released last summer into EA, then over that next year they released chunks of the game, sort of like as the story was unfolding, until the full game was finally done back in June. Then they upped the price by $10, but not before putting it on sale again for the 1.0 release.
Intuitively it always seemed like there was a sweet spot. Too short a period and there’s not enough time to build hype or (more importantly) fix the issues revealed by Early Access. Too long a period and people forget about your game, and EA players got everything they wanted out of it before launch, so have little reason to come back and boost visibility w/ player numbers.
It’s nice to have some hard data to back this up and put an objective measure on where that sweet spot is.
I feel like Abiotic Factor did a really good job with this. It released last summer into EA, then over that next year they released chunks of the game, sort of like as the story was unfolding, until the full game was finally done back in June. Then they upped the price by $10, but not before putting it on sale again for the 1.0 release.