Yet another idea which looked good on paper, Early Access has served as a double-edged sword. Allowing customers to buy into what was effectively a beta or sometimes even alpha of a title, Early Access saw popularity with growing games with booming communities despite their incomplete nature. The likes of DayZ, Rust and many others found success in Early Access and continue to build towards bigger things thanks to the additional income. The chief problem is that the system is easily open to abuse and, like so many other things, it lacks active oversight. There is no definitive push by Valve to ensure that games listed under it are being actively developed, or that they will not merely be abandoned a few months down the line. The closest there is to any set of standards or a warning that a project might never see fulfillment is a blue bar, which states that a game "may or may not change significantly over the course of development" along with a word from the developers themselves. There is no effort made to ensure that players are informed of future updates, that any kind of development schedule is followed, or even a general outline of what is finished. Many games have found success with such transparency, such as Failbetter Game's Sunless Sea, which lists what elements are closest to completion and publicly displays a development road-map. All this is even ignoring some of the worst uses of the system, with developers using the system to escape criticism of obviously broken games. Notably BlackSoul: Extended Edition was initially uploaded to Steam as a full release, only for Valve to quietly move it to Early Access when criticisms were levelled about its finished quality. While the actual idea of Early Access has merit and does feature good titles, the system desperately needs staff to crack down on the quality of titles. The system needs set standards, careful monitoring of all games listed and workers that will ensure they will see continued development as time goes by. Without it, Early Access will merely become yet another element of Steam to be exploited and fill up the platform with low quality, partially complete games.
A gamer who has played everything from Daikatana to Dwarf Fortress. An obsessive film fanatic valuing everything from The Third Man to Flash Gordon. An addict to tabletop titles, comics and the classics of science fiction, whatever media they are a part of.
