Best Practices - The Do's and Don't's of Early Access

Early Access is a place where users on the Oculus Store can preview playable VR experiences that are still in development. It is an invaluable tool for iterative development and community building. But, as with all tools, it can also be used poorly, limiting your game's potential reach. In this blog, we'll cover a few Do's and Don'ts to help you use Early Access for the best possible app launch.

Whether you target Early Access or not, building and shipping VR games is often an iterative process generally involving Ideas > Implementation > Verification/Feedback > Repeat.

Early Access is most useful as a way to verify your ideas and gather feedback from players to see if you succeeded with your implementation before final release on the Oculus Store. Early Access provides the opportunity to engage vocally with your app community and act on user feedback before your full build launches on the Store.

To do this, build out mechanisms, either within the game or on external channels, to gather feedback from your growing community. Make sure you engage vocally, so players know that you're listening and acting on their feedback.

During Early Access, unlike other methods of user testing, you won't be able to ask players to provide feedback on specific aspects of your build or only look at certain levels. There won't be a Game Design Document or Test Plan to accompany the build, or a friendly developer watching your players and taking notes every time a player gets stuck.

Be prepared, as users may make snap decisions based on incomplete data, or try to play your game in a way you never expected. That doesn't mean their opinions are not valid, just that they don't know as much about your game as you do. As an engaged developer, you'll need to build out the missing components to either steer players to come to the conclusions you intend, or experience the game the way it's meant to be played.

If all goes according to plan, you'll find an excited player base that will become the core of your Discord/Forums/Reddit community. But first, you have to get them excited. Their first impression is going to be what sticks.

In other words, have a clear plan for the next steps in development and have a specific, measurable goal or learning in mind.

The best way to make the most of Early Access feedback is to focus on feedback discussing targeted aspects of your design that your team would like to improve or expand. Users may not call out specific mechanics or aspects of your app to work on, but that doesn't mean their feedback can't inform your development process.

For example, you might be building a multiplayer game and while you have the core mechanics down, you still want to balance the abilities and build more maps. When you launch a game like this into Early Access, your goal would be to find out if your match telemetry is delivering balanced patches or needs further improvement. Some feedback you might receive could be “Ugh, I always feel like I'm up against players that are much higher in skill than me.” This type of feedback is a signal that the mechanic that you set out to analyze needs improvement.

Remember, it's important to show your players that you're listening to their feedback and making the game better in response - a better game is a win for you and a win for the players.

By having a target, and by laying out the target in advance, you are also able to limit scope creep in your development process, communicate more openly with players about what type of feedback is useful, and discuss with your community how you plan to implement changes in upcoming patches.

Your first Early Access launch should contain a vertical slice that is representative of the quality bar that you are targeting for the full launch.

While Early Access is hugely beneficial when managing player expectations, at the end of the day someone is going to purchase your Early Access build and expect a high quality experience. You are able to start with a more limited offering and can increase the quantity of content over time, but Early Access should include parts of the game that demonstrate core gameplay.

This will allow you to put your best foot forward and set a good impression with the community while still allowing for future growth of your application. Ultimately, you want Early Access to benefit your development process and help grow your business.

Often times we see developers attempt to use their Early Access Launch as an opportunity to begin their app marketing. Whether Early Access or not, you should line up as many of your promotional events to coincide with your launch. This could be as simple as a 10% launch discount, making sure your app appears in both the New Releases section and Promotions sections, but could involve much more.

In order to maximize your opening weekend, you need to start talking about your game ahead of time. The goal is that when the game does launch, it's something players have been waiting for and are excited to buy, not something they are just hearing about for the first time.

At first glance, Early Access seems like it should be the moment when you begin marketing and the "Full Launch" of your app is when you should be when you really go all out and plan your big “marketing splash”.

Unfortunately, we've noticed that apps don't typically benefit from this strategy. When you move your app from Early Access to Full Release, there will be a small boost to your metrics. However, that boost will be similar to what you would see with other promotional opportunities, like Free Weekends, Content Updates, and Sales. (All things you should do!)

Early Access launches often have similar revenue and downloads graph lines as a non-Early Access game releases. The first time an app becomes available, in any state, we tend to see the biggest adoption, retention, and revenue numbers, whether there is an Early Access tag or not. Everything after that is new user acquisition, existing user retention, and iterative improvements to existing metrics.

Another way of putting this: no matter how you position the game, you only get one launch.

Over the past few years, we've been happy to see so many people enjoying their time in VR and to see developer success making VR content. From what we've seen on the platform so far, we hope that these do's and don'ts will give Developers a useful tool to release their game in the best way possible. For more information about Early Access, please reach out to our Submissions Team.