Are Steam Playtests the new Early Access?
Haven't been blogging much due to catching my first case of Covid, quickly followed by a mouse infestation in our apartment, quickly followed by a kind of shocking medical diagnosis. Work has still been happening on Fatemender, I just haven't had much free time to write about it.
Having just recently released Love in the Time of Spellphage we're now fully focused on Fatemender. February and March have been about starting new projects around marketing and getting feedback. The biggest one of those is running our first public playtest on Steam.
While this has been a very rewarding but very scary jump into community management, there's something that I've been thinking about lot about while getting so much feedback and interacting with new players: Is this early access?
Early Access
A few games have recently launched into failed early access releases. Probably not just recently, probably a large portion of games in the last 2 years that wanted to do an early access run of their game.
On paper early access sounds like a great idea, something we ourselves were considering less than a year ago. But after watching and reading marketing advice we learned that the pipeline of early access games is kind of broken.
Players don't really want early access games any more. There are multiple contributing factors to this such as buying a game in early access that never comes out, low user bases, unresponsive devs, etc. Steam users can get pretty down on an early access game that doesn't get regular updates. And since Steam treats launching into Early Access as a game launch, having a bad one is hard to recover from.
Big studios with a good reputation can still do early access. Supergiant and MegaCrit being possibly the most well known for it. But a studio with their first game and no track record of releasing anything? It's hard to find people who want to gamble on that.
Which is a shame, it used to be fun to "get in on the ground floor" of an unknown game during early access. Usually the price would be lower than it would be at the eventual release, you were getting a discount for playing early and giving feedback. But these days it seems like games are priced at full price at early access release. So my thought is why would I pay full price for an unfinished game that might never get completed?
Pre-Steam testing
After deciding that early access sounded like a bad idea for this current time in gaming, we knew we'd have to pursue other ways of getting early feedback on our game. We started very small and have been working our way up to this Steam Playtest.
- Shared early prototypes and builds with our game making community.
- Shared the prototype with our friends.
- Took the completed prototype to an in-person event.
- Took feedback from all those sources, made changes, and looped back to our first 2 groups.
We're trying something fairly novel with out game that takes a fair bit of onboarding for the player. There are lots of rules to take in and we want to seed ways to think about problem solving using the tools that the game provides early in the tutorial. So we've been iterating on the first hour of the game a lot to find a way that appeals to the widest audience possible while still keeping the game challenging.
By this point we had re-worked the tutorial multiple times and were ready for a wider audience, as well as an audience of players who are more aligned with the type of game it is.
Opening up the playtest
In preparation for the playtest we had set up 2 things:
- A feedback form that is prompted to the player at the end of the tutorial.
- A brand new Discord server also linked within the game.
Steam offers some statistics besides just signup numbers. They tell you who has actually installed the game as well as some stats around the amount of time people spend in game. But besides that, there isn't much that Steam gives perspective on during a playtest. If you want to know anything else besides time in game you need to be prepared to gather data in your own way.
(I honestly think Steam should use the Steam Community forums for playtests. Give games a hidden area or something. I'm sure they would prefer that players stay in Steam instead of being sent to random forms or Discord.)
We announced our playtest on February 27th (Only signups, no game access yet). On the first day we had over 100 accounts sign up to gain access. Given how Steam works there is a high probability that a large percentage of those are bots but given that we didn't advertise the playtest anywhere on the first day we were still surprised by the number.
We let our first batch of around 40 players in a few days later.
We got our first Discord stranger join on March 4th. Then our first feedback survey on March 5th. We'd probably let in about 90 sign-ups by this point.
From there on out we were getting a feedback survey every other day and a few Discord joins a week. It was a shock to me! I really wasn't expecting people to join a Discord server for an unknown game from an unknown studio. What a wild feeling to have people you don't know join up to follow your progress.
What helped
A few days after we opened the playtest to signups we also started to run some Reddit ads. One of the biggest hurdles indies face is just getting eyes on your games. You can try to get attention on TikTok or with Reddit posts, if you're lucky enough to have a viral looking game. But we know our game doesn't have much viral potential. It's not amazing 3D graphics. There isn't much in the way of hilarious bits. Nor super cute looking cozy critters. But we do know that our game is fun if you can get someone to the playing it stage. Hence ads to get people to sign up to the playtest and not just wishlist. Multiple people told us that they got to the playtest through a Reddit ad, so feels like they're doing the trick!
Where we are now
One of the general rules of feedback is that you can stop collecting it when you stop getting new information. We're now at the point that people are writing less and less in each feedback form. We don't think it's perfect but we have been releasing a new build every week that incorporates or iterates on the user feedback from the previous week and bugs and weird behaviour complaints have gone way down. And the answers for "do you feel like you understand the game?" have been steady.
So we're feeling pretty good about how they playtest played out. The tutorial is feeling much tighter compared to last month. And we feel good about the changes. Some of the issues brought up were things that we internally had been on the fence about. Some were just great suggestions that made sense as soon as we heard them. A really interesting give and take with our new community.
After a month of having the playtest open we're now thinking of closing it down for a bit and building our next strategy.
Since this playtest was so focused on our tutorial we're thinking about what we might want the next playtest to focus on. Balance is a big thing as a few of our early savants were able to beat the "endless" mode that we included to be something of an "ultimate challenge". Turns out that clever players can spot the winning pattern within an hour or two and once you have that card combo it becomes much harder to fail. So we're re-visiting card distribution and power levels now.
You can turn off and re-active a playtest with a new build but I fear it's going to be much harder to find new players who want to push the content that's 3+ hours into the game. We also don't want to share too much extra content beyond what will be in our eventual demo. But we are finding that the feedback has really been helping to balance the game and smooth out some rougher areas that didn't stand out to us.
As we were taking in this feedback, making changes, and releasing new builds, I couldn't help but think that this is the flow that most devs are hoping to get with early access. Early access was touted as a way to get feedback and improve your game with a big audience, while also getting people to buy your game. We didn't get a big audience, nor make any sales. But we did get good feedback. And I would wager a studio with an existing fanbase could really capitalize on a solid playtest or two instead of risking an early access launch.
There are still people out there who are very excited to try new, unproven games. And they're ready to give feedback.
What's next
We'll probably consider running a second playtest with extended content in the future. But our next focus is how to get more eyes on our game. We're applying to showcases, looking for streamers who might like playing, trying to finesse our Reddit ads so that they are finding the right audience, crafting short form videos for the short form video apps. We really want to give our game a fighting chance so we're pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone and putting some money into advertising. All while still refining our demo.
There's also still a lot of art for me to get done as the last 2 months have been a bit of a wash on the drawing front.
Hoping that I can stick to a more regular blogging schedule again, especially after I put so much work into migrating to have an easer blog publishing flow!