Dwarf Fortress' publisher reckons the smash hit management game will never reignite the 120,000-concurrent-player success from its Steam launch again, but that's not even remotely a problem for them or the developers.
Kitfox Games, which publishes everything from Caves of Qud and Boyfriend Dungeons to Six Ages, recently put out a blog post delving into the advantages and potential pitfalls of early access development because "the human element has been largely missing from the conversation," as well as the different types of early access that studios might pursue.
Kitfox Games co-founder Tanya X. Short and community manager Alexandra Orlando explain that one possible avenue for early access developers is to simply "Skip It" or, in other words, do it like Dwarf Fortress. "A cheeky answer for many reasons, chief among which is that it was never actually in the official Steam Early Access program at all," the blog explains. "Partly because Early Access didn't exist back in 2006 (let's be honest, Steam itself barely did), but partly because the creators wanted to keep expectations low, by giving it away for free/donations."
Dwarf Fortress' two-person development duo were apparently "extremely aware" of the added pressure that would come from Steam's higher player base, which eventually found the building sim with 120,000 people playing the game simultaneously when it came to the platform in 2022. "A year and a half later the Adventure Mode beta snuck players back up above 20,000. Will Dwarf Fortress ever have 120,000 concurrent players again? Maybe, but probably not? Does that bother anyone? Not that I’m aware of."
"It's fine if we've 'peaked'. We're not here to make as much money as possible," the blog post continues, since the developers "don't really care" about "capitalizing" on their success - "they just want to live a comfortable life working on their game." As we've seen from Hooded Horse's strategy hits, 1.0 launches often lead to record player counts and give years-old games a nice second wind, but that's just not what the Dwarf Fortress team were interested in.
So Dwarf Fortress skipped an official early access tag because it had already been in the works for years before its Steam release, and in a sense, it's a game that can never really be complete. The developers are planning to continually update it for years to come, so who's to say when the game is 'done' or ready for a 1.0 label? Side-stepping early access means the developers don't need to work on complicated roadmaps and semi-frequent updates fuelled by angry online forums, though it's not a full-proof way to "escape the gamer-demand treadmill either" since "the marathon doesn't end with 1.0."
Early access pipelines were the subject of much debate earlier this month when Manor Lords’ publisher argued against the idea that games need to force their developers to pump out updates as quickly as possible.
