Have you ever come across an Early Access game on Steam, decided it looked pretty cool and downloaded it, only to realize it was kind of busted and never getting updated again? It’s long been a topic among PC players, and Valve now has a new tool to hopefully reduce such occurrences. A warning on Steam pages for Early Access games will now tell prospective buyers how long it’s been since the game was last updated.
As SteamDB pointed out earlier today, the revised warning appears inside the big blue Early Access box. In addition to including statements from the game’s developer about why the game is in Early Access rather than just being released upon completion and how long it will be until the game is expected to ship, a string of orange text now also indicates how many months or years it’s been since the last update went live. “The information and timeline described by the developers here may no longer be up to date,” a disclaimer reads.
It’s still not exactly clear what updates are substantial enough to reset the counter and how long it takes between updates for it to appear. Open-world survival zombie sim Project Zomboid has been in Early Access on Steam for over a decade and doesn’t show the new warning because it still receives regular updates. Its last one was in January.
Mostly, the new warning seems geared at indicating when Early Access games have been effectively abandoned. Unsung Story, the controversial Kickstarter project once posing as the spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics which never got completed, has a label indicating it’s been abandoned for four years now. Prior to this update, Steam users would have had to click through to the reviews section to read other users mentioning whether a project was still in development or not.
It’s another feature designed to help Steam users navigate its massive and unwieldy library of games—19,000 new games were released on it in 2024 alone—especially as more and more games, including high-profile ones like Hyper Light Breaker and Hades 2, opt for Early Access releases. The new warning arrives just a few months after Valve also started cracking down on developers promising DLC and battle pass content that never materializes.
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