Kinda crazy up to this point it wasn’t the finished release. Why were they selling it on consoles like Switch if it was still in testing?
For game journalists turned devs, you’d think they’d know better than to sell unfinished games. Did they need money this bad, did the first one not earn enough to pay for the sequel to be made? I got a bunch of questions why Supergiant is using early access. At a certain point you should put your big boy pants on and finish a product before selling it.
I’m not a fan of early access in general but this is one of the cases where it’s done right IMO so let me add some context and corrections:
Supergiant isn’t that big so outsourcing a bit of testing to community isn’t that egregious. Larian did this kind of early access for Baldur’s Gate 3 for similar reasons and with similar results. Studios of this size are in an awkward spot where they don’t have AAA publisher money so they rely on their hard earned reputation.
There was no early access on consoles, it’s strictly Steam/EGS thing even though Sony and Microsoft have similar programs („game preview” etc). Nintendo doesn’t allow early access kind of content on their platform but that’s a moot point.
Supergiant is very upfront about this not being complete game because they don’t want latter parts to be spoiled. They use early access to fine tune gameplay mechanics and based on first game they’re very good at utilising this feedback. When I was younger and had more time I enjoyed participating in beta tests because those games were not figured out yet and could be broken in amusing ways. My guess this combined with Hades being a roguelite makes people okay with giving them money for EA.
