Steam Now Offers Notice For Early Access Games That Haven't Been Updated In Months

Steam has added a new warning to the Steam pages of early-access games that have not been updated in a long time.

SteamDB spotted this addition to the early-access widget on Steam pages. Steam has historically denoted that early access games "are not complete and may or may not change further," but it's now getting more specific as to when a game was previously updated, regardless of what the developers wrote in their early access widget. Specifically, it seems to kick in if the publicly available build of an early-access title has not seen an update in over 12 months.

Take Atlas, a pirate open-world game from the same publisher as Ark: Survival Ascended that was released in early access in 2018 but has not gotten an update since May 2023. A message on its Steam page now reads, "Note: The last update made by the developers was over 20 months ago. The information and timeline described by the developers here may no longer be up to date." Similar messages can be found on the Steam pages for games like Pirate Software's Heartbound, Hi-Rez Studios' Realm Royale Reforged, and League of Geeks' Jumplight Odyssey.

Although Steam can't force developers to update their games or bring them out of early access, this warning at least gives potential buyers a clear warning that the game they're about to purchase hasn't been supported in a while. You can check the Steam News page of any early-access title or SteamDB to see when a game was updated last.