"This continuing migration, I'll call it, of hyper-casual mobile culture, and hyper-casual gaming culture, and live service gaming culture is washing through Steam right now. Now the culture has changed and early access, essentially, has lost its meaning. People just buy an early access game like they buy a normal game and treat it like that's the game."

Personally, I don't buy early access games ever. I know I'll likely only play a game once; and I don't want to "ruin" my experience with the unfinished version. I'm happy to wait for full release.

However, I think Buckley is off-mark here. It's got nothing to do with "hyper casual culture", which sounds completely made up by the way. It's simply the media pipeline for gaming has changed.

Many people learn about games, especially indie games, through streamers or independent content creators now. Those content creators are then incentivised to jump on a game as soon as it's available to get ahead of the hype. It's not economical to sit back and wait for every game to leave early access before playing / reviewing it; they would just get left behind.

That has the side effect of pulling the trigger on the hype train way earlier than 10 years ago. Users see their favourite streamer playing and want to play too. 10 years ago early access was, as in the article, feedback for the developers. In 2026, your game kind of has to be presentable and "mostly done" in early access, with some polish left to go. Very different landscape and reception.

For better or worse, publishers and developers need to adapt to this market reality.