Endless Legend 2 Hits 1.0, and Amplitude Looks Back at Early Access

You have to love a studio that let you play its game while it was still wet paint. Long before Steam Early Access existed as a checkbox on a store page, Amplitude sent preorder players an alpha build of Endless Space ahead of its July 2012 launch, patching it in public as they went. That is fourteen years of showing you the scaffolding before the building is done, and it built the kind of trust you cannot buy with a marketing budget.

The habit never really left. Amplitude still runs Games2Gether, its ongoing program for talking design decisions through with players and polling them on where a game should go next, and right now a small group is doing exactly that for the newly announced Humankind 2. Now that Endless Legend 2 has finished its year in early access and reached 1.0, co-founder and CEO Romain de Waubert de Genlis told Rock Paper Shotgun that "the whole thing has changed over time," pointing out that fifteen years ago, players understood an early build was unfinished by definition.

They don't, always, anymore. Early access used to be an honest handshake between a studio and the people who loved its games enough to watch them grow; now half the industry treats it as a permanent excuse to ship first and finish later, and calling that the same thing as what Amplitude has been doing since 2012 is an insult to the word "early."