Freehold Games' upcoming Caves of Qud expansion, Diaspora, will launch in Steam Early Access — the first DLC ever to do so, roughly a year after the base game's 1.0 release ended its own nine-year run in the program.

Kitfox Games co-founder and head of publishing Tanya X. Short, whose studio handles publishing duties, admits the idea took some selling. "I was a bit hesitant at first to be honest," she told Game Developer. "But Jason [Grinblat] and Brian [Bucklew] were really keen to continue with the development strategy that had been so successful for the main game throughout their long Early Access."

Why does this break new ground?

Steam's Early Access program has functioned as a one-way door for most of its existence. Games enter, iterate with community feedback, then graduate to 1.0. DLC, by convention, just ships finished. Whether Steam's rules ever explicitly prohibited in-development DLC or whether nobody tried is unclear — but nobody had tried.

Valve had to intervene on the technical side. Short says the company made a "manual adjustment" in Steam's backend to "enable it as an option." Then the store page review process flagged the Early Access DLC as a bug. Valve, she notes, has been a supportive partner throughout the uncharted process.

What does this change for studios?

The practical precedent: developers can now fund and iterate on an expansion in public, the same way they once did with the base game. For Freehold, the reasoning is twofold, laid out candidly in a press statement.

• Complexity. Caves of Qud is an intricate game with interlocking systems and unpredictable, emergent gameplay. Diaspora adds a new layer, and the studio wants the community stress-testing it "the whole way."
• Timeline pressure. Freehold describes its own development pace as slow and says it doesn't want to be "beholden to a timeline that forces us to compromise the expansion's vision." Early Access lets the studio fund Diaspora's development as it happens — "watering the flower as it blooms," in the studio's words.

That second point carries weight for any small team weighing paid expansions. It's effectively a revenue-during-development model applied to post-1.0 content.

A nine-year habit, hard to break

Caves of Qud has been in development since 2007, when Freehold Games started work on it. It entered Steam Early Access in 2015, spent roughly nine years there — nearly as long as some studios' entire lifespans — and shipped 1.0 in 2024. Jason Grinblat and Brian Bucklew, the game's lead developers, spent that entire stretch building alongside player feedback.

Short argues that closing the door now would run against their nature. "[Brian and Jason] love working with their players, and they already had all the processes and habits to do it again, so why not?" she said. "It would have been uncomfortable and against their natures to work in a totally closed-room environment, rather than develop alongside feedback from their players."

A test worth watching

There's no guarantee the model works for DLC, just as there was no guarantee it would work for games back in 2015 — when Caves of Qud boarded the program relatively early in its rollout. The title arguably helped prove the format then, and it may be doing the same now for studios hunting new development and communication models for post-launch content.

How Diaspora performs commercially in Early Access — and whether Valve makes the backend option available beyond a manual adjustment — is the signal to watch for any studio considering the same route.