Steam now warns customers when an Early Access game has been abandoned

While the Steam Early Access program has been a huge success for many titles, from small indie hits to large AAA games like Baldur's Gate 3, there are plenty of bad actors who have also taken advantage of the program. Steam Early Access has had a problem with abandoned projects since it first launched. Now, Valve is finally looking to tackle this issue head-on. 

Moving forward, Early Access titles on the Steam Store will display a warning, letting buyers know when a game has potentially been abandoned by clearly showing how many months have passed since a game's last update.

As an example, the publisher behind ARK: Survival Evolved, Snail Games, signed on to be the publisher for another massively popular early access MMO, Atlas. The game launched back in 2018 and sold quite well at the time. However, the game has not been updated in over 20 months. As a result, the Atlas page on Steam now states that “the last update made by the developers was over 20 months ago. The information and timeline described by the developers may no longer be up to date”.

Grav, another Early Access title released in 2015 that aimed to cash in on the No Man's Sky hype around that same time period, now has a warning stating that the game has not been updated in a whopping seven years, despite still being sold on the store.

This will hopefully discourage bad actors from abandoning projects, or at the very least, encourage them to remove games from sale on the Steam Store once abandoned, as new customers heading to the page will be immediately warned of a game's abandoned status.

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KitGuru Says: It is about time Valve started to do something about the number of abandoned projects in Early Access. My next question is, should Valve allow abandoned early access games to carry a price tag? I feel there is a way to support small solo projects, without allowing blatant cash grabs to remain to gather profit. Perhaps after a two year cut-off without a news update, those games should simply be delisted? 

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