Trendy Entertainment’s Dungeon Defenders II is still in development and available for sale on Steam’s Early Access service, but next week PlayStation 4 owners who pay for a bundle of in-game currency on PSN will be able to download the game and play it in a “Pre-Alpha” state.
This is intriguing because it represents Sony’s first meaningful foray into offering paid early access to games in development, a practice popularized by Steam’s Early Access platform and adopted by Microsoft earlier this year with the launch of the Xbox Game Preview program.
At E3 last year Sony exec Adam Boyes told Gamasutra that the company was having “massive conversations internally” about permitting paid alphas to be sold on PlayStation hardware, but since then the company has remained relatively quiet on the topic. It’s yet unclear if Sony has any plans to continue releasing games in “Pre-Alpha” states on its platform going forward.