Evil Empire says early access is harder as indie discovery gets tougher

Evil Empire, the studio behind Dead Cells, The Rogue Prince of Persia and Castlevania: Belmont's Curse, says the changing expectations around game development are making early access a harder decision for independent teams. In a new interview, CEO Thomas Pfeiffer and head of business Ben Laulan also discuss the studio's Triple-i Initiative, Steam discovery and the limits of AI-assisted development.¹

Why Evil Empire created Triple-i

Evil Empire grew out of Dead Cells developer Motion Twin and now works across several projects, including live-operations support and partnerships with larger publishers. The studio's Triple-i Initiative was created after the team struggled to find a showcase that could connect The Rogue Prince of Persia with the specific audience it wanted to reach.¹

The initiative's April event generated around three million wishlists across its participating games, according to Laulan. He says the October showcase was still impactful, although its reach was affected by Steam visibility and the platform's limit on how often an event can receive prominent featuring. The latest line-up included The Talos Principle 3, the Subnautica 2 and Dave the Diver crossover, Aftergods and Machinarium 2.¹

Laulan's advice to developers is to focus less on a showcase's total view count and more on whether the audience already plays similar games. That is a useful distinction in an increasingly crowded PC market: visibility is valuable only when it reaches players who might actually wishlist or buy the game.

Early access is no longer an automatic answer

Both Dead Cells and The Rogue Prince of Persia used early access, while Castlevania: Belmont's Curse launched without it. Laulan says early access helped Evil Empire reach players and build games alongside their communities, but he no longer sees it as a simple default. The studio is still discussing what makes sense for its other projects.¹

He points to higher expectations around content and quality, joking that developers should “thank you, Hades” for raising the bar. Pfeiffer agrees that studios still need to reach players early, but says early access is not the only route now. Teams may need another way to collect feedback without committing to the expectations that come with a public, unfinished release.

That tension is increasingly familiar. Early access can create a valuable feedback loop, but it also turns development into a public promise. Players do not just see a prototype; they see a product with a roadmap, a community and an implied obligation to keep improving. For a small team running several projects, that commitment can compete directly with the flexibility that early access is supposed to provide.

Evil Empire is wary of AI replacing the team effort

Pfeiffer says Evil Empire does not use AI in its production work. His concern is not simply whether AI tools can write code or produce assets faster, but what might be lost when the shared struggle of making a game is removed. He describes game development as a collaborative creative process built on disagreement, alignment and the pleasure of solving difficult problems together.¹

Laulan accepts that AI-assisted development is coming, but says the studio will keep crafting games in the traditional way for now. Pfeiffer's argument is less about rejecting every tool than protecting the meaning of the work: a game can be technically good while feeling different if its creative decisions are shaped mainly through collaboration with a machine rather than a team of people.

Our opinion

Evil Empire's comments are most interesting because they connect three pressures that are usually discussed separately: discovery, early access and AI. A studio that cannot reliably reach the right players may need a showcase; a studio that reaches them too early may inherit a punishing development contract; and a studio that automates too much may lose the human collaboration that gives its games a distinct identity.

None of that makes early access or AI tools inherently bad. It does suggest that neither should be treated as an automatic growth strategy. Evil Empire's approach is more cautious: find the audience first, choose a release model that the team can actually sustain, and use technology without allowing it to erase the creative relationship at the centre of game development. That is a less flashy message than “make games faster”, but probably a more durable one.