Valve’s Steam digital marketplace is incredibly popular for PC gamers. It is one of the main sources players use to purchase digital games and connect with friends. The marketplace has a massive storefront filled with countless games, but on top of that, there are Early Access titles. Today, we’re finding out that Valve is updating how they handle Early Access games. Overall, this will ensure consumers are a little more aware of what they might be buying into.
Early Access can be great. If you’re interested in a title, getting in through Early Access will grant you access to help developers further tweak the project, all while you continue enjoying the gameplay experience. You’re essentially getting to playtest a title and watch as the developers continue working on the project. However, some games seem to drop in Early Access and get scrapped.
Those games can go on for years without updates from the development team. Unless you do some research into the games, you might unknowingly purchase a copy of a title that is in development hell. Thanks to a Reddit post, we’re finding out that Valve is starting to update the store pages, alerting consumers on how long the game has gone without being updated by developers.
It looks like this only concerns the Early Access section of the store page listing. As PC Gamer spotted, there were instances where developers made updates to a game but didn’t adjust the Early Access section. As a result, Valve put a warning on the page for consumers.
This is a welcomed update for Steam, as it’s easier to keep players from potentially wasting money. However, it’s clear that developers will want to take note of making updates on their store listing page more often rather than just pushing out updates directly through the game.
