Most Early Access games do reach 1.0, says a study of 23,247 Steam games

A gamerofpassion.com study finds 61% of reviewed games that entered Early Access from 2013 to 2023 reached full release, even though 6,989 of the 12,320 games now in Early Access carry Steam's no-u...

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Six in ten Early Access games that enough players reviewed have reached full release, according to a study published on 9 October by the independent blog gamerofpassion.com. Its author followed 23,247 games that have been through Steam Early Access, including ones later removed from sale, using public Steam data as it stood on 26 September 2026.

The headline figure covers the 10,141 games with at least ten Steam reviews that entered Early Access between 2013 and 2023. Of those, 6,144 (61%) had reached 1.0. Another 2,672 (26%) were still in Early Access with no update for a year, at least 702 (7%) had been removed from sale before a full release, and 623 (6%) were still in Early Access and had been updated in the past 12 months. Counting every game the study found from those years, however few reviews it has, the share that reached 1.0 falls to 51%.

The ten-review floor matters, and the author explains why: Steam only shows older graduates through their reviews, so the floor is needed to find them, and it also leaves out the smallest games, which finish least often. Among all 14,597 games from 2013 to 2023, 78.8% of those with 1,000 or more reviews reached full release, against 30.8% of those with fewer than ten.

Why the store looks worse than the results

On the snapshot day, 6,989 of the 12,320 games then in Early Access carried the note Valve added in February 2025 saying the developers' last update was over a year ago. Of the 9,063 that had been in Early Access long enough to qualify, 6,977 (77%) had it. The study's point is that games which finish leave the Early Access list while most of the ones that stall stay on it, "which is why the list looks worse than the outcomes." It never calls a single game abandoned, because Steam's data cannot say why a game stopped updating.

Finished games mostly moved quickly. Of 3,547 games with ten or more reviews that entered between 2013 and 2020 and reached 1.0 within five years, half took 315 days or less. Late finishes do happen: of 1,533 games with no full release after three years, about 21% got there within the next five. The study traces the often-repeated claim that only 25% of Early Access games are finished to an EEDAR count from November 2014, when the programme was about 20 months old. EEDAR checked again in March 2016 and found almost 70% of the 2013 games had been released.

A small group never leaves. Of 241 reviewed games that have spent over ten years in Early Access, 21 are still updated, among them Project Zomboid (since November 2013), BeamNG.drive (May 2015) and Universe Sandbox (August 2015). The study also names Phasmophobia and ULTRAKILL, both in Early Access since September 2020, as still updating.

How it was counted

The data was collected between 26 September and 3 October from logged-out Steam store pages, review counts, seven archived copies of Steam's app list and 690,585 Steam news posts. The author says the method found 286 of 300 known graduates and matched all 37 well-known games used as a check. It cannot see sales or motives, so it says nothing about whether a game launched too unfinished. Every game is in a free CSV linked from the study page. It is one blogger's work, with the method open for anyone to check.

Sources

• Do Early Access Games Ever Get Finished? 23,000 Steam Games (Gamer Of Passion)

Image: gamerofpassion.com