From Epic Exclusivity to Steam, and Eleven More Months
Hades started as an idea in July 2017, not long after Supergiant Games shipped its previous title, Pyre. The studio put Hades into Early Access on the Epic Games Store on December 6, 2018, then brought it to Steam in Early Access a year later, on December 10, 2019, according to Supergiant's own FAQ. Full version 1.0 didn't ship until September 17, 2020, for PC and Nintendo Switch. Add it up and Hades spent close to two years in a state the studio openly called unfinished.
That wasn't Early Access dragging on longer than planned. Creative director Greg Kasavin has said Hades was the first of Supergiant's games that the studio "planned more deliberately from the start" to go through an extended public testing phase, rather than the shorter previews it had run for earlier titles.
A Feedback System Instead of Guesswork
What Supergiant did with that time is the more interesting part. According to an interview with Kasavin, the studio set up a system in Discord where players could submit and upvote requests, and the team committed to reading through all of it. "No stone in the game was left unturned by our keen-eyed player base," Kasavin said. The goal, in his words, was to build in partnership with the community and test initial ideas sooner, rather than guess what would land once the game reached a wider audience.
That same approach carried into the sequel. Supergiant has said Hades II's new ending, added after its own Early Access run, was created directly in response to player feedback rather than being part of the original plan, a detail reported by GamesRadar+ following interviews with the studio.
What the Patience Bought
The results showed up fast once Hades left Early Access. Supergiant announced the game had passed 1 million copies sold by September 20, 2020, just three days after full launch. Of that total, 700,000 copies had sold during the Early Access period across both storefronts, and another 300,000 sold in the single weekend after 1.0 shipped. A few months later, Hades won Best Action Game at The Game Awards 2020 and was named Game of the Year at the D.I.C.E. Awards.
The Version That Scales Down
Not every indie studio can afford to run a title in public for two years, or has an audience large enough to make that worthwhile. But the mechanism behind it, a structured way to collect what players actually struggle with or want, paired with the discipline to act on it before launch, scales down fine.
A smaller, deliberate round of outside playtesting can surface the same kind of friction a two-year Early Access run does, just compressed into weeks instead of years.
IndieBug exists for that compression: structured feedback from real players, without needing Supergiant's audience or timeline to get it.