this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Early access might legitimately be the way to save the failing AAA market. You get a real chance to learn what players actually want, and how to appeal to them, while slotting your game into its proper niche.
I mean sure, there's bound to be stinkers, there always is. But Early access would kinda rock for these games. "The game runs like shit, we don't want to play it." Then next month you get a dedicated patch for performance and begs get squashed faster and more efficiently. Imagine if they didn't fuck around with borderlands 4 and released as an ea title. Could have worked.
Early access is more about getting revenue during development and some limited QA potential. There shouldn't be any surprises in the feedback, that would be a sign of major problems. EA also generally comes with a discount for the player which is anathema to the AAA crowd.
That's not all ea has to be, it can be more than that, all we have to do is make it look like more money can be made that way for AAA and we can have our cake and eat it too.
EA is great for small and medium sized studios to get games out that might be a bit more ambitious than they could manage with traditional models. The point of AAA is that they have the money to do big impressive things. They can already do focus groups and closed betas to get community feedback. The thing that might attract AAA attention is you could make a good amount without actually releasing anything.
Idk, id love to see it properly done from AAA. That would be a great way to prove you right or wrong.
I think their point is AAA studios could already have been doing things to gauge feedback but that they are largely greedy entities which would prioritize the profit that could be extracted from a scenario over the value it could provide to the game.
Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. Just look at Kerbal Space Program, for example. It pretty radically changed a few times through Early Access.