Since Early Access games were introduced on Steam, they constantly caused all kinds of questions, starting with the most basic one — what kind of person in their sane mind would pay money to do a beta-tester’s job? Sounds like an apple picking for a holiday activity, where you pay someone to work for them for free.

For this article I’ve analyzed games that were released from April 2015 to September 2015 and had at least one full month of sales. For most of the graphs I’ve only analyzed that first month — be it the game entering Early Access, leaving it, or launching old-school way without paid beta whatsoever.

How many Early Access games are there?

Short answer — a lot. More than 700 games have entered Early Access since 2013 and around 150 got actually released since then.

Interestingly in April 2015 we finally saw a rise in number of Early Access games being released. That’s, of course, because games take time to finish and an average game spends 14 months in Early Access stage.

2015 was particularly good year for Early Access games. Out of all games released this year 14% entered Early Access and another 7% left it.

I haven’t measured “dead” Early Access games, because this is something that requires a lot of manual work. At first I’ve tried to check for game updates on Steam, but it seems not all developers post news about their game updates on Steam, preferring forums instead.

Do you really have one launch?

In one of my first articles on Steam I wrote that Early Access games aren’t different from games with one launch, because EA games also have only one big launch, despite having two release dates. Of course it was before we saw many new games exit Early Access, so I wanted to go back and revise this assumption.

Let’s look at share of games that sell relatively good when they exit Early Access compared to their EA sales and how it translates into actual numbers.

As you can see the games that saw the biggest relative increase during the first month after leaving Early Access sold worse during EA stage, while the games that saw moderate or low increase sold way better during EA.

Which brings us back to original assumption — yes, Early Access games seem to have only one launch, sorry.

But the good news is:

if you fail while entering EA, you can still recover when you exit it, effectively moving your big launch.

Of course it will take a lot of work because, as pointed earlier, it takes 14 months for an average game to leave Early Access.

Are Early Access games sales different from non-EA games?

The answer is both yes and no. When your game enters EA, gamers seem to treat it in the same way as non-EA games. At least I found no statistically significant difference in sales or playtime.

But when your game exits EA, it is way more likely to sell well compared to an average game. If it survives long enough to actually get released.

Of course an average game on Steam isn’t selling really well and “Early Access survivors” could be considered outliers — games that were continuously supported for a long period of time. Maybe that’s why they’re selling four times better on average.

Median first month sales are 750 copies for non-EA games, 900 copies for EA games and 3,600 copies for games that just left Early Access. An average game sells 8,000 copies during Early Access stage if it survives long enough to get released. Which might sound like a lot until you divide it by 14 months of continued support.

What matters most for sales of Early Access games?

Unfortunately it’s really hard to determine. In part because correlation doesn’t mean causation and in part because some things are hard to quantify — user support or updates quality for example.

I took a look at several metrics, including user score, meta score, median playtime, sales during Early Access stage and YouTube coverage. As it turns out, all of those metrics matter a little bit, but the most important seems to be YouTube coverage.

But YouTube matters for all games, not just Early Access ones.

I was surprised to see that both userscore and metascore mattered relatively little, but userscore is basically a measure of user satisfaction, so it remains relatively high as people are more likely to buy games they’ll enjoy. And metascore matters less mostly because press isn’t likely to assign a score to Early Access games until they get released.

Genres of Early Access games

Another popular question people ask a lot: “Is Early Access a good fit for my game in this particular genre?” It’s hard to answer based on data alone, but here are the differences between most popular tags for Steam games in general and Early Access games.

Tag cloud for Steam games

Tag cloud for Early Access games

As you can see Early Access games are often Sandbox Open World Survival Simulators — the fact that was cleverly parodied by The Goat Simulator team.

Of corse it doesn’t mean that Early Access isn’t good for games in other genres, merely that it’s less popular choice for them.

Who’s playing (and paying)?

There are roughly 15M people that own at least one paid Early Access game on Steam — 11% of total Steam gamers. They are a bit different from your average gamer because they are more likely to be “novelty seekers” or ”heavy buyers” (people that jump from game to game).

Geographically they aren’t really different from general paying Steam audience, except for three countries.

For some reason people from Germany and France are more likely to own Early Access games, while gamers from Poland are less likely to do so. I have no explanation for this fact, so feel free to speculate.

Summary

There are over 700 Early Access games and around 24% of them got released already. On average released Early Access game spends 14 months in this stage, sells 8,000 copies during that period and another 3,600 in the first month after the launch.

YouTube coverage seems to correlate with first month sales the most, but it’s typical for all games on Steam. Userscore and metascore matter less.

Owners of paid Early Access games are more likely to own more games compared to an average Steam gamer. They’re also more likely to live in France or Germany and less likely to live in Poland.

This could be explained by the fact that Early Access games are different in their genre distribution compared to Steam games. Early Access games tend to be more often about Survival, Crafting, Open World, Simulation and Action.

Do you want to know more?

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