Steam Introduces Alerts for Early Access Games Without Updates in Over a Year

Valve is making a notable change to how it informs users about Steam Early Access games. Now, if a game hasn’t been updated in over a year, you’ll get a heads-up. This change was observed by SteamDB and comes in the form of a prominent warning at the top of the Early Access developer Q&A section. It informs potential buyers about the date of the last update for the game.

Additionally, Valve has revised Steamworks to explain this new alert system. “If it has been more than 12 months since a game’s developers have rolled out an update and posted an ‘update’ event to inform players,” Valve explains, “Steam will display a notice on the store page, right above the Developer Questionnaire. This lets players know the game’s update history status.”

There are two specific criteria that trigger this alert: if a year has passed without a new build being assigned to the ‘default’ branch in Steamworks, or if there has been no ‘update’ type event posted in the same duration. This includes major updates, regular updates, or patch notes.

For quite some time, Early Access has been a space where some titles unfortunately get abandoned by their developers. This new feature aims to provide more transparency to consumers navigating unfinished projects.