If you’ve been disappointed by the fact that some of the Early Access games you’ve obtained never saw a full release version – you’ve kind of wasted money on an incomplete game – to the degree that it makes you hesitate when purchasing any of them, then Valve has this situation considered and improved now. With its new hint on EA titles to show the last update time, you’ll have a better idea if you’d love to continue to purchase it.
As spotted by SteamDB, a line in orange under the Early Access Game label on a game’s Steam page now reads: “The last update made by the developers was over … [time span] ago. The information and timeline described by the developers here may no longer be up to date.” This warning message will for sure provide an important alert for you to be aware of the status of the games that you’re looking at – possibly unfinished or inactive.
But not every EA game will have this little note. According to the observations, it only appears for those without receiving updates for more than 13 months. Also, some titles received updates in their beta branches, like Heartbound, spotted by PC Gamer, but they still have the warning note. So, it’s unclear what kind of “update” the games need in order to remove the blatant line. We might need to wait for Valve to release an official explanation for this improvement to clarify things.
Early Access could be very needed for smaller studios who don’t have sufficient money or manpower to publish a game until it is fully completed. Having a game launched by EA helps offer economic support for them to work on the titles continuously. On the players’ side, they could usually spend less amount of money (as the full version is usually pricer) to enjoy the concept earlier and support the team in achieving their goal.
It could be a win-win solution, but due to the lack of sufficient information, players could be hurt in some cases, and they lose confidence in EA titles, which in turn hurt some developers who are determined to complete a game to release full versions. The new Steam updates could be helpful in balancing this situation.
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