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Valve now warns on Steam pages if an Early Access game hasn't been updated in a long time
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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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Counterpoint: There are early access games that have been under continuous active development for many years, but are also worth playing in their unfinished state. BeamNG.drive - a highly realistic physics-based driving simulation and sandbox - for example has been available for purchase for almost ten years and since then, it has seen quality updates in regular intervals. While this isn't the developers' only revenue stream (they are also making simulation software aimed at professionals), word of mouth and the resulting influx of new players is enough to finance the development.
another great example is satisfactory. it was in early access for a long time and the result is amazing.
It was on Epic Games before that too, but it is still incredibly rough around the edges, even after launch. From listening to the dev logs, it seems they made a lot systems quickly initially and then out grew them and spent a lot of time rewriting poor code, there was quite a bit of mismanagement with Satisfactory.
idk, have you played it? I have well over 1000 hours in it and it was worth every cent I spent from the day I bought it. even if they never added any updates after update 6 I would've been satisfied. but they didn't, they added so much more stuff and the 1.0 release was huge and really fucking awesome. I don't care about the dev logs or what their code quality is, the game is and was great and that's what I paid for.
Yes, I have over 500 hours myself and I am playing it right now aha.
I would recommend the game and it is worth the money. That doesn't mean I am going to pretend it is perfect and without issues. I am constantly wrestling with things in game, crashing and running into bugs.
I am also way more critical of games I like, because I want them to be just that bit better.
The exact one I was thinking of
Valheim is another great example, though it's still probably a year out from release
While I'm in complete agreement, and I'm a huge fan of Beam (originally bought it before it was even on Steam), at some point you need to draw a line for full release, and anything beyond that is feature creep.
I think it'd be good practice for everyone to have a time limit in place, since the long term EA games that turned out well are more outliers than the norm.
It's true. There are good examples of it being used properly, but I still don't think games should be in early access for more than, let's say, 2-3 years. Games should be at a point where they can be released in that time frame before even coming into early access.