It’s now slightly trickier to accidentally buy a ‘dead’ Steam early access game

Steam early access games that haven’t been updated in a long while will now be more prominently labelled as such, according to reports. As noticed by third-party tracking platform SteamDB, Valve have begun adding warnings to early access info boxes, making it harder to accidentally spend your pocket money on a promising project that hasn’t advanced in years.

I’m not sure it was ever that easy to mistakenly buy a ‘dead’ early access game, mind you, but it saves you the Dr-Watson-level detective work of digging up the last few update changelogs, or peering at the user reviews.

Valve have yet to formally announce this new approach. It’s a popular move already, but there are a few complaints about the execution. In the case of poor Heartbound up there in this article’s header image, some have pointed out that the game has recently received updates in beta. Valve’s labels only seem to apply to gaps between full public updates.

I’m writing this up partly because I’m interested to know what you all consider too long an interval between early access updates. At what point do you declare the patient dead on the operating table? Continuing with that metaphor, I guess Valve’s new labels are the equivalent of a doctor walking around the surgery loudly saying “Ms Heartbound has definitely popped her clogs – I guess it’s time to cancel her lunch order”. Which, with any luck, will cause Ms Heartbound to jolt out of her stupor, protesting that “no no, I was just having a nap, please don’t take my spaghetti bolognese with extra parmesan away”.

My take is that the acceptability of a gap between early access update varies by the game or genre, and that I broadly subscribe to the Hooded Horse philosophy of let-devs-cook. Personally, I only ever buy early access games if I’m absolutely satisfied by what they’re offering right now – day one Darkest Dungeon, for example. I will never buy something for what it might become. Embrace presence, I say. The future makes oafs of us all.

Valve have made a show of cracking down on slippery Steam practices lately. Back in November, they tightened the rules for games with delayed season pass DLC.