Early access and crowdfunding

What you're actually buying

A playable but unfinished game, or only a promise of one, while it is still in development. The price usually includes the finished game later, but a finished game is not guaranteed. You are absorbing risk that a publisher used to carry.

How it works

Instead of a publisher fronting production costs against future sales, players pay up front, sometimes years up front, through crowdfunding sites (where many people chip in to fund a project) or storefront programmes such as Steam Early Access. 'Still in progress' becomes its own saleable story: nail the pitch, keep the community close, and a game can fund itself before it ships. Player feedback can shape the finished game, which is how the good cases work. The bad cases are open-ended.

When it's fine

When the game is already worth playing today, the developer shares a clear roadmap, and you would be happy if it never changed.

Where it came from

Double Fine's Kickstarter launched on 8 February 2012, hit its $400,000 goal in nine hours and closed with more than $3.3 million from over 87,000 backers; monthly crowdfunding pledges for games jumped from around $200,000 to $4-10 million in the months that followed. Steam Early Access opened on 20 March 2013 with 12 titles, and DayZ reportedly sold over 300,000 copies in its first three days on the programme after joining that December. Subnautica spent just over three years in Early Access (16 December 2014 to version 1.0 on 23 January 2018) and became a hit. Baldur's Gate 3 entered Early Access in October 2020 and reached 1.0 on 3 August 2023, showing that a full big-budget role-playing game could grow the same way. Star Citizen's crowdfunding total has climbed past $800 million since 2012 with no release date for the base game.

Historical prices and revenues are in US dollars at the time unless marked A$.