Come with me. We’re going on a journey. Back in time to December 2020, on the eve of Cyberpunk 2077’s release. You, like me, may have been pretty, pretty excited right around then. CDProject Red’s next magnum opus was almost in our hands, and after The Witcher 3, it seemed they could do no wrong.
But cracks were already showing.
Console review codes? None to be seen. PC reviewers? Forbidden from showing their own footage, instead relying on provided b-roll. And the embargo? Ended only days before launch.
Red flags, maybe… but who cared? This is CD Projekt Red we’re talking about! The original 2013 teaser trailer even ended on the note of, ‘Coming: …When it’s ready’.
We were in for a treat.
Spoiler, dear reader: We were not, in fact, in for a treat.1
Now, you’re probably wondering why I would bother to recount this story some five years post-release. Cyberpunk 2077, for all its launch faults, is in fine form now. It wasn’t abandoned or given bare minimum technical touch-ups. Instead, it had literal years of additional development effort put in to make it sing.
I bring it up in the context of a brilliant post by Frostilyte, asking the question: “Should Grounded 2 even be allowed to utilise Early Access?“
My title probably spoils this, but: yes. Not only should Grounded 2 be ‘allowed,’ I wish more big titles had the guts to wear the Early Access label when it fit.
Cyberpunk sure should have.
Instead, gamers were left feeling anything — or everything — from frustration to disappointment, or even betrayal. Slap the EA badge on it and suddenly? The consumer transparency preserves a mountain of goodwill and space to grow.
That’s a fairly consumer-sided argument, sure. Although I would hope not a controversial one: If, for whatever reason, you’re not going to finish the game before putting it out, maybe at least be honest about this fact.
But Frostilyte had more than just us consumers in mind. He was interested in watching out for the Indies, and that’s where the debate perhaps gets a little more complicated. Early Access was, after all, born as an indie lifeline — a way to keep the lights on and build community while development continued.
It provided a path that maybe didn’t ask Indies to re-mortgage their house in trade for a year of development time in the hopes of not (literally) losing it all.
So when AAA shows up in that space, the worry is whether it tilts the field even further against the smallest studios.
And from that concern, there are a couple of additional paths beyond consumer transparency that my mind goes down, but neither of them changes my opinion.
- Indies and AAA already co-exist; and Indies aren’t just catering to a small niche of interest any more.
Indies and AAA’s already co-exist in the market today, having broadened from a once scrappy niche with only occasional breakouts to something with a higher degree of awareness in the gaming zeitgeist. AAA’s adopting ‘Early Access’ doesn’t materially change things for the worse, and in fact, there is an argument to be made that says such a move would further legitimise ‘Early Access’ and broaden the range of people willing to try it.
- What even is an ‘Indie’ anyway?
The term covers a vast spectrum, from the solo dev mortgaging their house we mentioned, to ‘indie elites’ like Supergiant, Team Cherry, or Larian, pulling in millions with sizable teams. Depending on how you define it, even CD Projekt Red might qualify as indie, given they self-publish.2 The gulf between struggling solos and elite indies is at least as significant as the gap between elite indies and AAA, which makes drawing the exclusion line at AAA feel arbitrary.
All said and done, I think the best way to sum up where I personally land on the matter is as follows: I don’t really care who uses Early Access, I’m much more interested in how it gets used.
Cyberpunk 2077 (and the other examples in the screenshots of this post, whether AAA, AA, Indie+ or whatever) didn’t get shit on because they were Early Access in spirit. They felt the weight of the doggy doodoo falling upon their shoulders from on high because they weren’t honest about it.
But do I see this actually changing? No, of course not. Would be nice though.
This was posted during Blaugust 2025, the annual blogging event normally hosted by Belghast, with a twist this year of being hosted by Krikket. Blaugust is an event aiming to welcome new blogger blood into the fold and revitalise those who’ve been at it a little longer.
The Blaugust Discord is still available to join in, year-round!
I nearly did a post bouncing off Frostilyte on this (Then I forgot about it because life moves fast, as Ferris Bueller liked to say.). The point I wanted to make was that the way I’ve always seen Early Access is as a huge bonus to the player, with any benefit to the developer running a far-distant second. I guess this depends on personality, but in all the time I’ve been playing video games, my top priority with anything new and exciting has always been how soon can I get my hands on it. That’s why, as far back as Anarchy Online around the turn of the millennium, I was literally filling out paper forms and sending requests in the mail to get CDs back in the post so I could get into betas for upcoming games.
By and large, most of the betas were barely playable and when the games launched and you had to pay for them they weren’t much better. Maybe gamers who’re used to single-player games haven’t had this as a totally expected, usual scenario but MMO players, certainly for a couple of decades, pretty much expected the games they paid money for at launch wouldn’t work. They weren’t just never perfect, they were barely playable half the time and always unfinished. And we still were desperate to get our hands on them as soon as possible.
EA removes a lot of the hassle of signing up for and hoping to accepted into formal testing. You just pay an entry fee, frequently less than the evental cost of the game, and there you are, playing it. That seems to be a huge improvement on what we used to do and to have only one downside, the cost of entry. Since that’s usually offset against the eventual price of the game, if you plan on playing it anyway, why not pay now and start playing immediately? Sure, the game will be buggy and barely playable but what made you imagine it would be any different at launch? Experience should tell you otherwise.
As for the “Don’t encourage them by doing their testing for free”, we’ve been doing that forever except we used to call it “beta”. The existential difference with EA is that, having paid to get in, there’s no moral obligation on you to do any testing at all. Just play it and let the devs worry about fixing it. At most they’ll get some free data from monitoring what you’re doing but they take that all the time any time you play any game. And if by some chance the EA period does lead to a better, less buggy, more finished game when they decide to declare it done, then everyone’s a winner – you, the gamers who waited and the company behind it.
On the “indie” concept, that’s something that’s been a point of contention in music since the 1980s. Half the indie charts used to be taken up with songs released on “indie” offshoots of majors. These days, although the term is still widely used, it mostly seems to refer to a musical style rather than the ownership of the label that releases it. I think the same will end up applying to games, if it doesn’t already.
I’m with you in viewing EA as a win for consumers, albeit not an unqualified one. It carries risk, in the same vein as backing a Kickstarter — although not, I guess, to the same degree. I guess it depends on how much you’re buying in and valuing the ‘getting access now’ part, or ‘what the game is now’, vs. ‘what it is promised to be’.
If you’re in mostly for that latter part, there will be at least a few burns to be had along the way. Not that it has dampened my enthusiasm very much!
I remember the MMO beta days as well, I don’t recall if I ever got a disc or not — I seem to recall mostly struggling along downloading beta clients while still on dial-up. The Shadowbane one was particularly painful in that respect, and yep, patently unplayable for quite a while!
In any case, sounds like a subject we’re in agreement on. :)
One of the upsides of being poor is I rarely buy games when they’re new and by the time they drop in price to where I’ll consider spending on them, they’ve generally been either polished up and working well, or they’ve been forgotten and I end up skipping them. So I still haven’t played Cyberpunk though I did purchase it finally at some point.
I did but No Man’s Sky at launch but I was in the minority of gamers who really enjoyed it even back then.
It is in a great state now, so you are actually in for a treat now whenever you do get around to it. :)
re: NMS — I think whether you could enjoy it for what it actually was at launch had a lot to do with how much you were aware of the stuff Sean had been saying in the lead up to release. Things that were not just broken promises, but flat out lies even up to the last weeks before release.
Although having said that, while I am extremely pleased at how well Sean and the team has since redeemed themselves and the game both — I do wish they would make the systems the game has just a touch deeper than they are. The game at this point is several miles wide and an inch deep. Well; maybe a couple of inches deep.
I think the last (or recent, anyway) patch went back and revisited the settlement system to add some more there, and I haven’t checked that out yet. But from what little I know, it seemed a step in the right direction!
You make some interesting points about “Early Access” to video games I hadn’t considered before, among both indie and AAA titles. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
On a personal level, I am grateful CDPR continued improving Cyberpunk 2077, bringing it to the point/state it is at now.