Early access has a new bully, and it isn't who you think

The jukebox is on a boss theme and the napkin in front of me says “early access = rough draft.” It doesn’t anymore. Apocalypse Studios CEO Denis Dyack told GamesIndustry.biz that “AAA publishers are abusing Early Access,” a line PC Gamer picked up this week, and I want to argue about it.¹²

My take: Dyack has the symptom right and the culprit slightly wrong. The problem isn’t that big studios use early access. It’s that the label no longer promises anything, so players fall back on judging every early release like a finished one.

Start with the numbers. SteamDB counted 2,924 early access launches on Steam in 2026 as of mid-October, up 18% from 2025 and 60% from 2020.² Early access went from a 10.4% share of Steam releases in 2024 to 13.7% this year.² That’s a crowded room, and the new arrivals include what Dyack calls giant publishers with enormous money and manpower, who can put up a polished product and treat it as a marketing beat.¹² He names Subnautica 2 and Path of Exile as games shifting the landscape.²

His own team says it never expected Deadhaus Sonata to be measured against AAA-budget early access games, and that this cut its marketplace impact.² Creative director Ethan McKinnon puts it plainly: players compare everything in one marketplace.² That part is hard to argue with.

Now the case against me, and against Dyack. Subnautica 2 isn’t a villain here. Creative director Anthony Gallegos says the team’s whole approach is shipping features while they are “very ugly, incomplete, or prototype” and trusting fans to give them grace.³ The game has been caught in a legal fight between Krafton and Unknown Worlds’ former leadership, and its team says it kept working through the noise.⁴ Nobody there is gaming the system. Early access is core to how they work, and the original Subnautica came out of that model.³

Fair. I’d even add that Valheim’s CEO says players hold early access games to maybe 20% lower expectations than a full release, which is still a high bar.² Players raising standards isn’t abuse. It’s the market working.

But here’s where Dyack still has me. Gallegos himself admits the term now covers everything from long open development to a paid beta soft launch three months from 1.0.² When one word means both, the small team that really needs feedback loses the benefit of the doubt. That’s not a rule the publishers wrote. It’s a vacuum they walked into.

What would change my mind? Show me that small early access games are launching and selling fine against the big ones. GameDiscoverCo’s figure that only 21% of Steam early access graduates earned more in their first 30 days after 1.0 than after their early access debut suggests the first launch carries the weight.² If data showed small teams holding their ground anyway, I’d happily respawn on a new hill.

Until then: treat early access like a real launch, because your customers already do.

A label that means everything protects no one.

Our read: Dyack’s complaint is really about an unlabeled spectrum. Steam could help by making clear whether a game is a rough prototype or a near-final paid beta. That’s an opinion drawn from these sources, not something any of them proposed.

Footnotes

1. PC Gamer, “‘AAA publishers are abusing early access,’ Denis Dyack says, and that’s making things harder for everyone else”. Retrieved October 30, 2026. ↩ ↩²

2. GamesIndustry.biz, ““Developers need to treat Early Access like a real launch, because players do” – Early Access games are on the rise, but so are player expectations”. Retrieved October 30, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

3. GamesRadar+, ““AAA publishers are abusing Early Access,” RPG dev says, and Steam games like Subnautica 2 and Path of Exile have warped “the landscape and players’ expectations”“. Retrieved October 30, 2026. ↩ ↩²

4. Rock Paper Shotgun, “Subnautica 2 dev thinks early access teams should worry less about adding features that are “very ugly, incomplete, or prototype”“. Retrieved October 30, 2026. ↩