He’d discussed the possibility of going Early Access over the weekend, but he made it official when he got home on Tuesday. The following Monday, McMain was due in Minneapolis for a press preview of the game. Their contacts at Steam also recommended taking an Early Access route to Lichdom‘s release. It wasn’t long after that McMain and Xaviant marketing director Greg Fountain paid a visit to Valve, just a few weeks before the 2014 Game Developer’s Conference. “That gave us the confidence to say, ‘Hey, we know that we have something fundamentally really strong.’ We always thought so, but we were relatively humble about it, and it’s just hard to have perspective.” Those things still ring true months later,” producer Josh Van Veld told Digital Trends. You’re going to have a hard time teaching people how to play it though. “They looked at what we had and said, ‘Wow, this is something really special.
The possibility was first raised in January 2014, more than a year after the start of production, when the Hit Detection consulting group paid a visit to the Atlanta studio.
That wasn’t part of the early plans at Xaviant. It’s important to get a sense of the journey that Lichdom took in getting to Early Access. Buy a game now - cheaply, and in unfinished form - and you can inform how things change. It eliminates the notion that the first version of a thing you’re buying is “finished,” and instead embraces the idea that the most successful creations are those informed by community feedback. Release a game when it’s first playable but far from complete, and then shape it in response to feedback gleaned from an active dialogue with the player community. Early Access is both an acknowledgment of the dangers of early adoption (no one likes to be a guinea pig, after all) and an opportunity for enthusiastic consumers to have a say in how the product they’ve purchased will take shape. Minecraft and a handful of other games like it introduced an alternative. Nowadays, savvy gamers go in expecting their experience to change over time - to improve over time. Diablo III, for example, is unrecognizable today compared to the state it was in when it launched back in 2012. Now we live in an era of day-one patches, hotfixes, balance updates, and more. In the olden times before high-speed Internet, the game you purchased on day one was what you were still playing months later. Xaviant’s process with Lichdom is an example of Early Access being done “right.”Early Access is a relatively new idea.
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