Early Access Sales

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Ronald

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Aug 3, 2024, 3:18:01 PM8/3/24

to gaylumriarob

Luna Social Care @ Shopify
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Thanks for posting this question. Congrats on your upcoming launch. I understand that you would like to make your shop available to subscribers before everyone else. That's a great idea! I'd be happy to provide you with a suggestion.

Shopify allows you to add password protection to your store so that you can restrict customer access to your online store. You can create a password and give it to customers that you want to enter your store. When a customer arrives at your storefront, they will see a password landing page while this option is enabled. My suggestion is to enable this feature, send out an email to your subscribers on Thursday with the password, and then you can remove the password on Friday to allow everyone else in. It's really simple to enable/disable the password. To do so, you can follow these steps:

In Password, enter the password that you'll give to the customers who you want to be able to access your online store. Don't use the same password that you use to log into your admin.

If you collect your subscriber list through Shopify, you can use Shopify Email to send a message to a specific group of customers (subscribers). To learn more about this, check out our help document: Email a specific group of customers.

Hi! Do you know if there's any way to do this same idea with scheduled availability? Currently I schedule my one-of-a kind items for availability at a certain day and time, and they can sell out fast. I'd like to give email subscribers early access, and then later remove the restriction so everyone can access any remaining new products, without having to manually add/remove the password at the exact moment. Is there a way to schedule this?

I did not find a free solution. I limped along with the manual password removal at the desired time, but then discovered that protecting my website with a password and then removing it had the effect of breaking all the links to product previews in the emails I had been sending out. I ended up purchasing a subscription to the Locksmith app, and I have been very happy with its functionality. Does exactly what I want down to the second. I protect my collection with a password, schedule my items to go live at 5pm, and schedule the protection to be removed at 6pm. Works like a charm but is $10 per month.

is it also possible to protect a specific product (not the whole page)? So that Newsletter Clients can shop one specific product with early access, but our shop will be still open for everyone?

Thanks

Hi @mexclusiveshop , yes that would block all pages. If you would like to restrict access to a specific product page or collection page without altering the rest of your website, you would have to use an app for that. Gatekeeper could be an option you can look into. It allows you to:
Steps
1. App Settings Page > Select a product or collection that you want to passcode protect.
2. Select the Date Range in which you want the passcode lock active.
3. Create your unique and fun passcode.
4. Save it and share the passcode with the customers you want through an email service or another channel that you use.
Hope this helped! Best of luck.

Hello Luna - can you password protect a collection? I am relaunching my online store and I want to give my email list the opportunity to buy a ticket for 48 hour priority shopping. Is this possible somehow?

A couple weeks ago I presented a very high level look at Early access. What I found was that for some games it was actually better to release in Early Access (and go full 1.0) that it was to just launch in full you can read the full analysis here.

For every game that had done EA and a 1.0, I sampled the number of reviews they had 1 month after EA launch and 1 month after 1.0. There is nothing magic that happens 1 month after, it is just a standard date to judge by. By one month a games launch discount is over, any Discovery Queue featuring is over, and the game is out of the New & Trending widget (available only for 1.0 games).

To see this visually, here is a review history for a random game I picked (Revita). Notice how you can see how the spike of reviews usually level off after the first month (indicated by the gray bars).

From VGinisghts, I exported all the data to a CSV and then used the help of ChatGPT to parse the data and draw graphs. NOTE I know ChatGPT can hallucinate but I was not using it to generate data, rather I was using the code parsing tool to quickly filter rows of the table by different criteria, generate queries, calculate things like correlation coefficients, and draw graphs. I always double checked numbers using google sheets to make sure the numbers were correct.

For most of the games I surveyed, they got a lot of sales in the first month of EA, but relatively not a lot of reviews. Then when the game launched to 1.0, I saw fewer sales but more reviews than at EA. On average, the units sold per review ratio was 10.3 points LOWER during the 1.0 than during the EA launch.

This is the question everyone asks me after their Early access launch. So a good way to predict what you are doing when you launch. Basically multiply your EA launch review count by some constant and maybe predict how 1.0 will go.

IMPORTANT: there is nothing in the algorithm that magically kicks in when review_count == 1000. I just use 1000 as a bellwether indicating the algorithm likes what it is seeing with this game and showing it all over.

When the Steam algorithm sees that a game will do well it throws so much support behind it that the sales (and therefore reviews) look like a hockey-stick that hides smaller success stories. For instance Mount & Blade II went from 100,636 reviews at EA launch to 203,621 at 1.0 Launch. It is huge increase between the two launches, but the game was a big hit from the start.

The correlation coefficient between time in EA and review increase on a scale of (1.0 to 0.0) is 0.141 meaning a very very slight correlation. Here is a splatter chart of all the games and their increase in reviews plotted against the number of days in EA.

BUT FIRST A CAVEAT: this is just my opinion and I am making some logical leaps that are not 100% proven in the data. But, we are all risk takers embarking on this entrepreneurial and artistic journey so there will never be a perfect decision that can be 100% proven with data. So yes, yell at me that correlation does not prove causation and that statistics cannot tell me what I am about to say. I know that. At some point we have to leave the comfortable nest of hard data and try to fly. So here goes:

If we look at it from the other direction, 285 games earned 200 or more reviews in their first month of their Early Access launch and 209 of those games went on to earn 1000 or more reviews by their 1.0 launch.

So my recommendation to games that got 200 or more reviews at EA launch is to keep updating the game, building your community, and (depending on your burn rate) living in Early Access for a long time. The Steam algorithm will most likely support you and show your game through out Steam. This scenario is the best scenario.

However, if you are holding out for things to change when you go to full 1.0 launch, I will be honest, it most likely will not happen. It is quite rare for a game in this position to radically change course and become a hit.

So similar to scenario #1, I would look at ways of cutting features, launching your game while you are still in the good graces of your community. I would not extend development. I would not risk spending additional resources hoping that you are going to fill and inside straight and suddenly become a hit. Look up the sunk cost fallacy. Do not make bad decisions trying to spend your way out of this problem. Do not spend good money on bad (as they say.)

Side note about this graph: why did the games with 250-290 EA reviews faire worse than games that earned 210-250? I think it is just a limited sample size. Since 2014, only 22 EA games have earned in the 250-290 review range. There is a lot of variation there.

We are thrilled to announce Local Game Store Early Access, the return of an early sales program for select Dungeons & Dragons book releases at local game stores! With this program, local game stores in the U.S. and Canada can begin collecting preorders now and sell original and alternate-art cover versions of select major tabletop book releases up to two weeks prior to the global on-sale date.

The Local Game Store Early Access for Dungeons & Dragons books begins with the release of Vecna: Eve of Ruin. Local game stores will have the opportunity to start collecting preorders right away and sell books to in-store or pick-up customers beginning May 7, ahead of the global release of the book on May 21.

This promotion is only for books sold in-store or for in-store pickup; online sales or shipped orders are not included. Promotional social media and signage assets will be available for download on the Marketing Materials page for each release, and WPN Premium stores will receive pre-printed signage to support preorders beginning with Quests from the Infinite Staircase.