Steam Update Warns You When Devs Have Abandoned Early Access Games

It can be a bit of a gamble to buy games these days, what with the amount of shovelware that you can find in official storefronts. You never really know what you’re getting sometimes, and that can be especially true on Steam, which has an enormous amount of games in early access that are being gradually updated and worked on by their developers.

When you’re buying a game in early access, you’re essentially buying a promise that you’ll get a finished game later down the line, but not all early access games are actually completed. You could end up buying a game on Steam that’s in early access, and then find out two weeks later that the game hasn’t had a meaningful update in over a year.

Steam Update Warns You When Devs Have Abandoned Early Access Games

Thankfully, it seems like Valve has a solution to stop its users from being burned. First shared by SteamDB on Bluesky, a new update rolled out by Steam is now letting users see how long it’s been since a game in early access was last updated, essentially letting you know whether a game has been abandoned by its developer and will never be released.

A good example of this is a game called Neon Echo, which reportedly had its developers laid off just a few months into its early access launch. You can see from the screenshot of the game’s store page above that there’s now a warning in place that lets you know the game hasn’t been updated at all in the last 20 months, and that the game will likely never be completed.

It’s a very small change, but an important one that should stop people from investing in games that are essentially already dead. It should also make developers a little more communicative, now that there’s potential for people to think their games are dead if they haven’t been updated in a while. Another pretty big consumer win for Steam players, as Valve is showing more and more that it wants its customers to have peace of mind.