Victor Vran - A Case for Early Access

Haemimont Games is presenting a case for Early Access in thier blog, showing how it worked for them in releasin Victor Vran.

Nobody out there knew about our game when we first released in Steam Early Access. This was, of course, our fault – we should’ve started with the marketing earlier. If you’ve opened our Steam forums on the first day, you would’ve found four threads titled like “Confused. Is this game like Van Helsing?” and not one thread that explains what the game actually is.

Thankfully, Early Access gave us the time to remedy the situation and things were very different on our actual release day five months later. By that time we had thriving Steam forums with many players that knew the ins and outs of Victor Vran and were more than happy to welcome newcomers and “very positive” user reviews with 93% user approval creating a very different impression to people that discovered our game for the first time.

There is one myth I’ve heard repeated several times – that you can’t have a proper game release after Early Access and that players, youtubers and journalists tend to ignore titles that were previously released to the public. I can’t speak for other titles, but this was certainly not true for Victor Vran. Our first few weeks after release were very strong both in terms of sales and press coverage and I think that the community contributed to this as several reviews commented that the Early Access players present the game very favorably in their reviews.

Thanks Eye.