Steam Next Fest has been an absolute blast! Adaptory has had tens of thousands of new views, downloads, plays, wishlists, and feedback. What’s next?

TL;DR: We’re moving Early Access release to 2025, to add more content and polish.

Steam Next Fest: By the numbers

Can you spot Steam Next Fest? Source: SteamDB.info

Feedback

Thank you all, so much, for all of your downloads, plays, and feedback over the last week! It’s been great to meet so many new fans and friends, and confirming that the game is heading in the right direction 😊

From the hundreds of comments & pieces of feedback, I’ve identified four main themes that Adaptory needs to focus on:

A more refined identity: Adaptory is an ambitious mix of ideas, and while I have been focusing on making sure the simulations are solid and that experienced base-building players feel at home, it would be helpful to focus on what makes Adaptory unique: the randomly generated world events, limited team size, quest/task systems, conversations, and other features not yet announced.

More content: The key systems of the game are working well, but there needs to be more content. More systems, more buildings, more art and conversations, a bigger and more interesting world to explore. The content schedule is already mapped out, it just needs to be put into the game!

Performance on lower-end machines: The game plays well but struggles on lower-end machines, especially laptops and integrated graphics. I think there’s still 1-2 orders of magnitude of performance tucked away, now that the game architecture has settled. Adaptory is not designed to be a casual game, but I want it to be playable on as many devices as possible – my goal is 30+ fps on a 2016 Macbook Pro.

Polished user interfaces: It would be nice to have a lot more polish and quality of life improvements to the UI. A lot of information is hidden away and could be exposed in better ways, with more tutorials and help getting started, and made more accessible to a wider range of screens. It can also be prettier!

Originally, the plan was to release the game in Early Access later this year, and then spend at least two years working on adding in a lot of these systems and content. However, I think if we push the EA release date back and focus on preloading this work before the release, the launch will have more of an impact, and we’ll build a bigger community. Therefore, as a team, we’ve decided:

The plan

We’re pushing back the Early Access date to 2025 (final date still to be announced). This will give us more time to add extra content, systems, and polish to really make the game shine at launch.

The Adaptory demo will remain on Steam, free to play. The demo will continue to be updated over the next year – particularly with UI, QOL, and performance improvements, so we can test things out and iron out bugs – but most new content will be exclusive to the Early Access release. EA is going to be huge!!

We’ll also continue to release demo updates on itch.io, if itch.io is more your thing. (Should we look at GOG or Epic too?) There’ll also be plenty more blog posts where we’ll tease out some of the new content as it’s added.

I’m also planning to run at least one closed beta test for Adaptory next year. This will be a focused, exclusive event where you’ll be able to play the new content before anyone else, and provide feedback before the game launches. If you’d like to be notified when the closed beta is open to signups, please join the Discord and/or the mailing list.

Select streamers and content creators will also be invited to a special preview build next year – so if you’d like to be part of that, please get in touch.

And of course, if you haven’t already, please wishlist Adaptory on Steam so that you can stay in the loop!

Thank you!

The last week has been incredible, so thank you for downloading and playing the demo, providing feedback and ideas, joining our community, and for all of your support. I’m really excited to show you what’s coming to Adaptory.