{"id":63924,"date":"2018-11-22T09:06:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-22T09:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/327876"},"modified":"2018-11-22T09:06:00","modified_gmt":"2018-11-22T09:06:00","slug":"we-happy-few-early-access-and-the-danger-of-a-good-trailer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/11\/22\/we-happy-few-early-access-and-the-danger-of-a-good-trailer\/","title":{"rendered":"We Happy Few, Early Access, and the danger of a good trailer"},"content":{"rendered":"

It might seem strange to say this now, but four or five years ago, the malevolent spirit of Early Access seemed to haunt every corner of the gaming world.<\/p>\n

Journalists\u00a0lamented the never-ending monsoon of unfinished games clogging their spam filters, PR fusillades riddled with typos occasionally erupting into their inboxes; experienced developers eager to test this new model found themselves spattered by the stink of shovelware, deserved or not; and players themselves tuned out by the droves, continually disappointed by quick cash-in after quick cash-in.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the PR perspective, back then, if your email said Early Access, it went to its own folder, and that folder was probably the garbage can,\u201d says Stephanie Tinsley Fitzwilliam, founder and chief of Tinsley PR, a marketing firm specializing in games.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey began inundated with these unfinished games they were supposed to write about, and that\u2019s not fair to them, even as good as the game might end up being. From a PR perspective, you\u2019ve killed your chance by releasing that broken game early.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, Early Access is merely an asterisk on a game\u2019s release schedule, another bullet-point for an player to consider before settling on the \u201cbuy\u201d button. For some mammoth genres, the pre-release hype cycle has become almost mandatory: it\u2019s hard to imagine any serious contender to the battle royale or survival thrones skipping that step, especially since Epic Games\u2019 industry-defining Fortnite continues to advertise itself as \u201cEarly Access.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, though the culture has shifted in favor of devs who try to organically build an audience as they work on the game itself, to hear some tell it, the label still brings a substantial amount of risk. After all, just ask Compulsion Games, the studio behind the hugely-successful first-person truncheon-\u2019em-up, We Happy Few<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The danger of a good trailer<\/strong><\/h2>\n

A simple chronicle of the many boundary-shattering events that occurred during the development of We Happy Few<\/em> is enough to make any game developer sweat. First came the successful Kickstarter, buffeted by a\u00a0healthy amount of buzz for the game\u2019s anesthetized take on London\u2019s \u201cSwinging Sixties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then came the Early Access release, which rocketed up the Steam charts off the game\u2019s highly-successful marketing campaign, which included an on-stage teaser at Microsoft\u2019s 2016 E3 press conference that set the veins of the internet alight with intrigue and rumor.<\/p>\n

As Compulsion’s COO &\u00a0producer Sam Abbott describes it, he began to see the idea of the game crystalize in the minds of the fans – an idea that diverged in both scope and scale from the game the team was actually making.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the game was launched in Early Access, the expectations of what it was were already set in people\u2019s minds,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was a very interesting sort of situation, because people looked in isolation at that video and assumed that\u2019s what the game would be, and ignored all the previous streams – which had millions of views at that point – and they ignored all the marketing material that was on the store page. They ignored the store page, the description, dev interviews, our commentary – basically everything that helps paint a picture of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“The first and most interesting thing I can tell to other developers:\u00a0Your store page is not irrelevant, but it\u2019s a bit irrelevant. If people have an idea in their mind of what your game is, that\u2019s what they\u2019re buying. It\u2019s not the fine print. In fact, it doesn\u2019t matter how big the print is.”<\/span><\/h6>\n

\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Abbott recalls, this apparent \u201cwindow dressing\u201d included a massive Early Access disclaimer that stated that Compulsion hadn\u2019t yet implemented any aspects of the game\u2019s story – instead, they were focusing on its kooky atmosphere and core survival elements, such as hunger and thirst meters.<\/p>\n

\u201cA large number of people just ignored that,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the first and most interesting thing I can tell to other developers:\u00a0Your store page is not irrelevant, but it\u2019s a bit irrelevant. If people have an idea in their mind of what your game is, that\u2019s what they\u2019re buying. It\u2019s not the fine print. In fact, it doesn\u2019t matter how big the print is.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the feedback continued to flow into Compulsion, the studio decided to make a late-game shift – rather than building a tiny, roguelike-flavored survival experience, they chose to instead staff up and make the game that their newfound customers wanted. In Abbott\u2019s mind, this was the key advantage that the open development process of Early Access afforded the studio.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think if we hadn\u2019t done Early Access, I don\u2019t think We Happy Few <\/em>would\u2019ve been as successful,\u201d he says. Of course, not everyone at Compulsion was thrilled with the studio staffing up to construct an indie experience that could compete with the likes of BioShock<\/em>, instead of the smaller-scale of the original pitch. For Abbott, however, such concerns about clarity and consistency of artistic vision are ultimately less important than building a game that an audience will mass around.<\/p>\n

Early Access can earn you\u00a0useful\u00a0feedback — but it won’t save you<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\u201cLook, I\u2019m a producer,\u201d he says. \u201cI think a lot of talk about vision and that sort of thing is wank. I appreciate that people have ideas in mind, and sometimes they have a very crystal-clear idea of what they want to build, but the truth is that visions change…the game you want to make rarely survives first contact with people. We were able to build out these story locations and story moments and character development. When your game gets bigger, you spend more time with the audience, and you can become more ambitious.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In order to make that experience possible, however, Compulsion needed money, and a lot of it. As We Happy Few<\/em> ballooned, so did the studio itself, first through a close partnership with Microsoft – which bore fruit in the form of that highly-prized E3 stage slot – and eventually the newly-forged publishing arm of Gearbox, who provided much of the funds that ultimately allowed Compulsion to reinvest in their idea and scale up to a \u201cretail-quality\u201d title, along with a raft of other investors.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“One: do you think your game would benefit from significant, ongoing feedback? And two: do you have financing requirements that might benefit from Early Access?” If the answer is yes to both, then I think you should go for it.”<\/span><\/h6>\n

\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While Abbott describes both relationships as extremely productive, a retail game almost always carries a premium price tag, and that\u2019s where the controversy began to flood in: when Compulsion made the tough decision to raise the price from $30 to $60. Though Abbott and Co. carefully authored a blog post where they announced the decision, once word of the hike creeped outside the community, the internet ran wild with the news.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as I\u2019m aware, I don\u2019t think anybody has been quite as open about that decision as we were at the time,\u201d Abbott says, with a small sigh. \u201cEvery single reason is there, and we\u2019re quite open about a bunch of things that influence decisions once you start getting into the retail market…The community that follows us understood what we were doing, but the people who picked it up on Reddit, or maybe an angry YouTube video, just sorta caught the price rise and didn\u2019t understand we were effectively tripling the size of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJudging price is difficult no matter how you look at it, but I think the bigger issue is unless the community is judging your final product, they\u2019re not going to have the right perspective. It\u2019s not something that consumers and gamers are aligned on at all. You\u2019ve got some people who\u2019ll never pay more than $15 for a video game. Obviously, that\u2019s a bit absurd when you think about the time and energy people put into them. The bigger companies have created a lot of monetization systems because certain customers don\u2019t want to pay anymore, even though the costs of development are increasing. All of that is really not to criticize anyone, but to mention that people are in different situations and places all of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

When push comes to shove, Abbott says that if Compulsion could start all over again on\u00a0We Happy Few<\/em>, he\u2019d make all of the same decisions again. Though he thinks Early Access is ultimately here to stay, to him, player communication still remains one of the greatest challenges that the team faced, and he\u2019s still not quite sure how to fix it.<\/p>\n

Even though Compulsion published three years\u2019 worth of blog-posts detailing every aspect of the game\u2019s turbulent development, it didn\u2019t do much to stem the tide of angry commenters when word of the increased price hit major gaming subreddits. And though developers might still maintain a stereotype of what an Early Access game looks like, Abbott says that it\u2019s best to keep an open mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople say that Early Access doesn\u2019t help story-based games, and while I think that was a challenge in our situation, it wasn\u2019t for the reasons that people talk about. People say that a story spoiled is a bad story, but in our case, the story wasn\u2019t there, but the setting was. It\u2019s all about managing expectations in that regard, if a big part of your game is missing, then you need to properly communicate that.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt all goes back to two core points,” Abbott concludes.\u00a0“One: do you think your game would benefit from significant, ongoing feedback? And two: do you have financing requirements that might benefit from Early Access?” If the answer is yes to both, then I think you should go for it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It might seem strange to say this now, but four or five years ago, the malevolent spirit of Early Access seemed to haunt every corner of the gaming world. Journalists\u00a0lamented the never-ending monsoon of unfinished games clogging their spam filters, PR fusillades riddled with typos occasionally erupting into their inboxes; experienced developers eager to test […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63925,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63924\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}