EA has no plans to adopt Early Access game development model

With more and more developers and publishers adopting the early access development model, it's interesting to hear that Electronic Arts has no plans to offer such with its games. Sure, you'll have traditional beta periods for upcoming games, but right now EA is "not close to anything" regarding early access, according to CEO Andrew Wilson.

For those unfamiliar, early access is a type of development model in which games are evolved as the community plays them. Traditionally, early access games start off in a Alpha state. In this state, a developer will invite fans to play and then take their feedback to shape the game. Some of the decisions are based on what the playerbase wants while some are based on stats discovered by people actually playing. It's actually a very clever model provided you can get the message across that it is an early build of the game and not representative of the final product.

Early access first picked up steam on PC, but is slowly gaining traction on consoles as well. In fact, Sony recently announced that it's bringing DayZ, a post-apocalyptic survival game currently in early access, to the PS4. Does this mean traditional publishers/developers like Electronic Arts could soon adopt this type of policy? Not any time soon, according to Wilson.

"We're not close to anything," he told Game Informer when asked if early access is something EA is interested in exploring.

"What you have seen from us is a willingness to bring gamers in early and you'll continue to see that," he said, perhaps in reference to the newly announced EA Access program for Xbox One which grants members a few days early access to a game ahead of its launch.

"You saw us launch a Battlefield: Hardline beta much, much earlier than we ever would before," he continued. "You see us bring players to Dawngate over the last year before the thing was ready for prime time."

"To the extent that we'd run a model like the DayZ model, I don't know," he said. "I don't know. It's an ongoing conversation. I would much rather do it in the context of a beta scenario where we bring people in and when it's time to ask them for money we're delivering them a great game, but who knows?"

"The world will evolve and our job is to listen to how players want to engage," he concluded.

Do you want EA to offer early access on its games or are you content with the current beta/EA Access structure?

[Game Informer Issue 258]