Assetto Corsa Evo devs quietly changed Steam description, paving the way for Early Access price hike. The game wasn't updated in a month
Kunos Simulazioni studio declared that the price of Assetto Corsa Evo would not change until the early access release. But then the developers changed their minds and quietly edited the game's card on Steam without telling anyone.
Two months have passed since the early access launch of Assetto Corsa Evo... however, only the first one brought any updates to the players. After releasing version 0.1.6 four weeks ago, the Kunos Simulazioni studio went quiet. Meanwhile, the game's rating on Steam started to drop, with only 62% positive reviews in the last 30 days, due to many unresolved technical issues. These issues range from poor optimization and errors in saving progress caused by server instability to the complete inability to launch the program.
To make things even worse, the developer quietly introduced a controversial change to the description of their game on Steam. At the time of the release, the section with information about early access contained the following statement:
The price will remain the same throughout the entire early access period. It will increase when we officially release version 1.0 [...].
However, the following message is now found in the same palce:
We can decide to raise the price during early access [...].
Of course, gradually increasing the cost of the game is normal in Early Access. In the case of Assetto Corsa Evo, it would be even more natural that the initial amount was set at a modest level of $39.99. However, the controversy arises from the fact that the developers introduced such a change quietly, without communicating it in any way to the players. There is virtually no communication or transparency between the two groups.
I assume that Kunos Simulazioni will only get back in touch when they release another update. Most likely it will be version 0.2, which on the Roadmap is listed as "the 2nd early access release" (without a tentative release date), and it is supposed to bring, among other things, the COTA track, 5 cars, more options for organizing single-player races, and improvements to the VR mode. But there is no point in expecting any reference to any problems or controversies.
