Early Access Stopped Being a Development Tool. It Is Now a Business Model.

Opinion

Introduction to Steam

Early Access was introduced on Steam in 2013 with an explicit purpose: give developers a way to fund continued development through player purchases while being transparent that the game was unfinished. Twelve years later, the majority of games using the label are not doing that. They are selling an incomplete product at full price, maintaining it at partial capacity indefinitely, and treating “Early Access” as a liability disclaimer rather than a developmental stage.

The original framing had a specific implied commitment: the game would, at some point, leave Early Access. It would be finished. Kerbal Space Program entered Early Access in 2013 and reached version 1.0 in 2015. Factorio entered Early Access in 2016 and reached 1.0 in 2020. Hades spent 21 months in Early Access with regular, substantial updates before its 1.0 release in September 2020. These games used the model as intended.

DayZ

DayZ entered Early Access in December 2013. It left Early Access in December 2018, five years later, at a point where the core survival experience was still in a worse state than multiple community-developed mods had achieved in the interim. H1Z1 entered Early Access in January 2015 and had split into two separate products by 2017, neither of which ever reached a state the developers seemed satisfied with. Ark: Survival Evolved spent three years in Early Access and launched its 1.0 while already selling paid expansion DLC, a decision that remains a reference point in discussions about what “finished” is allowed to mean.

Current Situation

The current situation is different in character. A significant number of Early Access titles on Steam are not ambitious games with delayed completion timelines. They are session-based multiplayer games or survival sandboxes where “Early Access” means “this is the product, there is no 1.0 planned.” Rust has been on Steam since December 2013. As of 2025 it remains in Early Access with a player count consistently above 100,000 concurrent. The Early Access label on Rust is not communicating “this is unfinished.” It is communicating nothing, because “finished” has no agreed definition for a live-service survival game with no fixed endpoint.

The counterargument is that transparent labelling is better than no labelling. If a game is incomplete, calling it Early Access is more honest than releasing it as a full product. This is true in principle. In practice, the label has been diluted to the point where it no longer reliably communicates anything about the game’s state, development timeline, or the developer’s intentions. A player buying an Early Access title in 2024 has no basis on which to predict whether they are buying a Hades or a DayZ or a Rust.

Minimal Requirements

Valve has minimal stated requirements for Early Access: the game must be playable, the developer must be honest about what is and is not finished, and developers must provide information about their development plan. The third requirement is enforced by self-reporting on the store page. There is no mechanism for verifying that the stated plan is the actual plan, and no consequence for a development plan that simply never concludes.

The players who have benefited most from Early Access are the ones who treat it as a subscription to a game that will never be finished and enjoy it on those terms. This is a legitimate way to engage with Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, or RimWorld. It is not the relationship the label was designed to describe, and it is not the relationship most buyers assume they are entering.

The Fix

The fix is not complex: release dates, or explicit acknowledgement that no release date exists. “This game will be in development indefinitely and there is no planned 1.0” is honest. “Early Access” as currently applied is not.