Planet Explorers - Steam Early Access

Pathea Games has a new update for Planet Explorers about Steam Early Access.

Steam Early Access

It’s February, 2014. If you remember correctly, we said Planet Explorers would be out by now back on Kickstarter (if you don’t remember, go straight to paragraph two!). Obviously, it’s not. We do apologize for that. We were a little too optimistic with our schedule and personnel acquirement (and frankly, making a RPG is harder than we expected). The game also expanded in scope by quite a bit. So in the end, we have to revise our schedule. We aim to have the game in final form before the end of 2014. This is a lot more realistic and much more attainable. The Kickstarter items will be sent out when that happens. But, hopefully, after following this game for over half a year now, you will have seen enough to trust in us to not only finish this game but make it worth your time.

Which brings us to the next point: Steam. We’re currently selling the preorder for Planet Explorers on our site, it’s doing decently in sales, but we’re not close to breaking even each month. Thus, we’re always very conservative with our budget and it’s been working out for us so far. But, our cash reserve is decreasing, and if we want to make Planet Explorers into a great game, we need to hire a few more developers (from 28 to ~35). For that, we will need the revenue that being on Steam Early Access can bring.

We plan to release our first Steam Early Access build when Alpha 0.75 comes out, probably in the last week of February. What does this mean for you? Anyone with a key already will get a corresponding Steam key. Anyone who doesn’t want to play on Steam can still use our standalone program and we will continuously update the download versions on our own site as well. The first version of Steam of course won’t be perfect in integrating all the Steam functions, but we will try to take advantage of Steam features such as the Workshop and voice chat in game in the future.

For our release schedule, it’ll mean shorter duration and less new content in each new build. We won’t be doing the 4 months that it took to get a0.7 out the door anymore, even though some people actually liked that. From Steam on, it’ll be about 1 to 1.5 months inbetween each build during the rest of alpha.