Why Early Access is so big for MMOs: The Escapist speaks with Pantheon and Pax Dei developers

The Escapist speaks to Visionary Realm and Mainframe about their MMORPGs, Pax Dei and Pantheon to discuss living in an Early Access-funded MMO world.

It’s no secret the MMORPG genre is in crisis. 2025 saw Zenimax cancel its heavily developed MMO despite reportedly positive executive feedback. Amazon shuttered New World after a promising Season 10 launch, taking its Lord of the Rings MMO down with it. NetEase axed both Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street’s indie project and Jackalyptic’s Warhammer MMO too, saving face for funding Eastern MMOs and other games.

The message is clear: Western MMOs are expensive, high-risk, and there’s simply not enough funding to go around, especially with interest rates high and large amounts of tech funding going to AI. If a passionate MMORPG is going to get made, it needs dedicated fans to find alternative income sources.

For years, Kickstarter and Patreon were the answer. But increasingly, Early Access has become the funding model of choice – not just for indie hopefuls, but for high-profile projects too. Ashes of Creation launched into Steam EA last month despite crowdfunding millions. Hytale follows suit with its recent EA launch on January 13th, too, bringing years of hype to consumers after Riot Games almost condemned the project to oblivion.

Why EA? This is likely something we are going to see more of, as it’s a reliable way of getting fans to their games. And what are these small teams learning as they attempt what Triple-A studios won’t?

We spoke to two developers navigating this landscape: Sulka Haro, Co-Founder and CPO of Pax Dei, which launched and exited Early Access in 2025, and David Beach, Project Manager at Visionary Realms, the studio behind Kickstarter-turned-EA MMO Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.

Why build an Early Access MMO?

The unique part of building an early access MMO is letting players actually play the game as a product while still making it into one. It’s all well and good that you can build internally, but sometimes, you need your audience to know your game. Both studios hit similar walls in traditional testing.

For Pax Dei, Haro explained: “We were starting to hit the limits of what we could get from internal testing, from giving access to small groups of players, or from running time-limited, larger Alpha tests.”

The game needed scale.

“Pax Dei is an open-world social sandbox MMO, and a large part of the core gameplay experience comes from players interacting with one another,” he said.

Pantheon faced the same reality.

“The biggest consideration for us in the decision to go with Steam EA was to expand our reach to a wider audience,” Beach says.

Numbers only tell part of the story. An MMO needs solid infrastructure, and players stressing it out tells you a lot. (as we saw with pseudo-MMO Fellowships’ backend issues when it launched.)

“We needed to make sure that our game would hold up with larger populations, both in terms of the technology and infrastructure we were using, but also just in terms of the way we were designing the systems. – Says Beach

Although it was a key part of developing the game. Early Access brings some realities to the developers as players en masse access their work-in-progress.

“Interacting with a large player base brought to light previously undetected problems,” Haro admits, “and we ended up spending more time and energy than expected fixing quality issues in the initial weeks and months.”

Beach echoes this sentiment: “Overall, the Steam Early Access has been incredibly helpful for us – in some ways even more than we were hoping. It has allowed us to see places where our original designs wouldn’t have translated well to a diverse audience.

“That has been invaluable! It has translated well to a diverse audience. That has been invaluable! One of the great things about the Steam audience is that there are many kinds of players ranging from casual explorers to hardcore raiders, and we have seen examples of all those player styles jumping in to try Pantheon during Early Access.”

The surprise wasn’t just technical. Haro notes one pleasant shock: “The highly positive response we got to our building system was a pleasant surprise, and we were delighted by the players’ creativity from the start, and still are to this day.”

The realities of building in Early Access

While Early Access serves its purpose of testing, updating, iterating, and laying the infrastructure. It also comes with its own attrition battles. It’s a natural process of learning what works and what does not. Interestingly enough, both developers find their audiences engage in Early Access a little differently. For Pax Dei, it’s about proper communication and promises, since the team is very small for an MMO studio. While Pantheon’s community seems to be more interested in more complete patches.

“In hindsight, we should have waited before publicly sharing a roadmap for Pax Dei,” said Haro. “Based on player feedback, we had to sideline some items from our original list to prioritize other features, a shift that unfortunately disappointed some players.”

When asked about how transparent you want to be with Early Access MMOs, there’s a fine line somewhere.

He added: “Our principle has always been to be honest and transparent with players. That includes acknowledging when things go wrong – outages or bugs – and being able to change our mind and adjust based on reactions from our community.

“At the same time, everything we say in public gets interpreted as a promise. We don’t want to disappoint players, so we always have to be careful about setting the right expectations.”

Haro tells us a good example of communication with players when they released their launch trailer:

It’s been fun to listen to some streamers comment on this, with someone mentioning our launch trailer sounded like us saying ‘This is game. Game is good. You play,’ which was hilarious but probably had a seed of truth to it.

It flowers from dealing with a specialist Nordic-inspired game alongside a global, old-school sandbox MMO audience.

“We’re constantly talking to people from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, who interpret what we’re saying through their own perspectives,” Haro says. “Most of our team comes from the Nordics, with a culture where we only say things when we think we have something very important to share, and we often struggle adding flourish to the message in ways some might expect.”

Communication is key to sandbox games. While the players make the content, there still needs to be fresh content added to the game to give players meaning to what they are doing. It seems to be why tone, promises, and pipelining are big things to the Pax Dei.

Haro told us: “Sandboxes are in some ways harder – the key difference with other types of MMOs is simply that the range of player behaviors you need to observe and account for is much broader than in a game with tighter control in the game loop.

“So, for Early Access, just observing what players are doing in a sandbox and turning those observations into actionable improvement ideas is a challenge, especially given that players’ reactions to those changes are often hard to predict.”

Pax Dei continues to develop in 2026 with post-launch content, bringing the lessons with it to post-launch content planning. When asked about balancing content patches at rhythm, it was a challenge for sure.

Though learning how to deliver at scale in regard to team size became important: “Pressure during Early Access also helped us develop the process and ‘muscle’ as a team. We delivered 3 content updates over the last six months, in addition to executing the 1.0 release of the game. Early Access was definitely an excellent training ground!”

Pantheon’s experience thus far

On the other hand, Pantheon discovered that Early Access didn’t lower player expectations; rather, it raised the team’s development responsibilities. It’s something that stems from the team’s original kickstarter planning and testing. It’s always been in their DNA to release larger theme updates at given points, rather than semi-fleshed out systems or features. And it’s a culture they are taking with them through the EA period.

When pivoting from Kickstarter to Steam, Beach stated: “The biggest consideration for us in the decision to go with Steam EA was to expand our reach to a wider audience, and to get it to the players who were most anticipating it…

“Steam EA was a good way for us to get feedback from many more players, and to help us test our systems with many live players at the same time.”

And that meant provisioning extra time for polishing and fixing bugs before each update release.

Players, he found, would rather wait than receive half-finished content: “What matters most is that those things are released in a finished and functional state. Quality of our releases is most important; frequent releases are a close second to that, so players can stay engaged and interested.”

While discussing the team’s process through EA so far, Beach tells us of an internal tool they are using to make NPCs have super unique spells and effects. It’s where the devs are having a lot of fun pipelining new enemies to fight, boss encounters and other effects.

However, while the tool is very powerful, it does isolate the spells and effects, and makes it harder to fine-tune and balance, as they have to go through each individual NPC individually, rather than modifying a general spell.

This fine-tuning is part of the reason why Pantheon is taking its time with quality updates. It’s also part of the reason why Pantheon’s dungeons are a key pillar of its old-school MMORPG design, but also why the content takes a while to release.

“This has taken us a few weeks to get sorted out, but by doing it, we keep ourselves out of trouble in the future,” Beach tells us. It’s why EA games can go quiet for a time. “It’s never something that our players would notice, but we’ve been working to go back through all of our NPC abilities and make sure that they all conform to the same methods of finding their targets and applying damage or other effects.” 

As we go through 2026, Pantheon is still working on the next major dungeon feature, Nightfall Crypt:

“Our first Nightfall Crypt is still very much under construction, but it’s coming together pretty well. We have most of the area laid out, and we’re working on visual polish while we set up the various NPCs that players will meet in the Crypt – along with a few other surprises that they’ll find along the way. We’re looking forward to releasing it soon and watching groups run through it to uncover its secrets.”

Again, that NPC spell editor is looking rather useful, but also why the polish is taking its time.

Having a big patch where players can give more detailed feedback on a core pillar and system is why Panteon wants high polish. So they know they can continue with the key elements of the game on the road to release.

Learning your audience

As mentioned, building in early access allows you to learn what your audience wants. Devs can adapt to it and help pave the road to launch. A feature of Steam Early Access development over the last 12-13 years has been live testing.

To help improve communication and clarify what to expect, Pax Dei developed a clever workaround: a test world within Early Access itself via Steam’s branches.

“We’re using that feature to distribute a different client for one of our game worlds, called Arcadia. Arcadia is our test world,” Haro explains. “The part of the community living in this world receives content updates before the main servers. Their feedback allows us to adjust the update to address concerns before we ship the content to all players.”

It’s reminiscent of how Old School RuneScape lets players vote on content – get feedback before it becomes a promise. Recently, Manor Lords ran some huge beta patches after the Hooded Horse CEO helped to communicate after a long, stagnant period of Early Access on the main branch. It’s a pretty big part of curating experiences with EA audiences, regardless of genre.

Meanwhile, Pantheon learned to strategically bundle updates.

When we can ‘theme’ our releases, they’re more likely to generate excitement among our player base,” Beach says. “When we are planning releases, we try to center those around a big new piece of content or a big gameplay update.

More importantly, they stopped shipping incomplete work. “We have found that players respond better to releases that feel ‘complete,” Beach notes. “In the past, we would release a new zone and then plan to go back and fill in parts of that zone that were missing. Moving forward, we want to get to a place where we are releasing the new zones with more of their features and points of interest there at the beginning.”

It harkens back to the initial launch of Early Access for Panethon. The human and Ogre zones were much more complete, with quests, hubs, and grinding dungeons. Meanwhile, Wilds End, featuring the Elves and Halflings, had grinding areas, but lacked anything more typical of the RPG part of the MMO.

The result is that players played the other Human and Ogre zones more, as it offered more of the game.

Discord: A virtual home away from virtual home

Throughout my chats with the developers, one thing commonly popped up about testing and communication: Discord.

Discord has become one of the main forum areas for many gaming developers and marketers. It’s easy to set up channels, get the player base there engaging with each other. Naturally, it’s become a go-to place to discuss a game, and then easily structure feedback around patches, updates and whatnot through threads and pinging players already interested in the game.

For Pax Dei, Steam is just the storefront.

“We’re actually handling this mostly outside of Steam,” Haro reveals. “Our primary channel for talking to the community is the game’s official Discord server, which currently has over 70k members. That’s where most of the conversation about the game is happening.”

Pantheon discovered Discord’s stickiness keeps players invested even when they’re not actively playing. “Even players who have stepped back and taken a break still remain active in our Discord and overall community,” Beach says, “and so we are confident that they’ll come back from time to time to check on how the game is developing and see new content that has been added.”

Hytale has been very open on social media, with its devs active on social media. It also has A very engaged Discord, with discussions about its very recent launch. Ashes of Creation has also built its hype and momentum on solid communication over the years. It’s why its Steam launch did very well, all things considered, given the talking points prior to its Steam launch.

The Early Access paradox

While Early Access is great for getting direct feedback and building an audience, it struggles now compared to earlier years. The reality is that modern-day behavior treats Early Access as a normal launch, regardless of its intended purpose.

Recent analysis from industry research firm GameDiscoverCo reveals that for many games, Early Access generates more revenue and visibility than the eventual 1.0 release. EA launch is often the big moment, not a prelude to it. It’s why developers need to launch EA games, and not just MMOs in general, with a solid core and a solid vision.

Pax Dei experienced this firsthand. When it launched into Early Access in June 2024, it peaked at 11,000 concurrent players, according to SteamDB. The full release in June 2025? Just slightly under 7,000.

It’s no fault of Pax Dei’s either; it’s just the reality of the situation.

Pantheon is not yet out of EA, so it’s not fair to compare numbers straight now. But, it will likely see a big burst of traffic come to a major patch, decline, then get an even bigger burst around 1.0. But how big remains to be seen.

It’s why communication is key. Not only to keep players interested in development, but to keep lapsed players returning. And then they are aware of when V1 finally hits for the celebration these amazing products truly deserve in a troubled time for the genre. 

Pax Dei is currently running a large discount and a free-to-play weekend as well. On the other hand, Pantheon is doing a massive Q/A soon, with it being released in EA for just over one year.