No penalties for violating Steam Early Access rules – Valve chooses communication over supervision

It turns out that Steam Early access has no solid rules governing how the program should be used by developers, not to mention some overall guideliness. Instead, Valve requires its participants to maintain clear communication with players.

Until now no one but the devs had access to Steam Early Access rules. However, PC Gamer managed to get their hands on that. What they pointed out is that while having a bunch of advice and guidelines, Valve have no hard enforcement methods in the cases of going against the rules. In other words, if something goes wrong – a developer fails to finish their game or include a promised feature – Steam owners won’t have any basis to act as a judge and executioner between the game dev and players, neither do they seem to police how individual EA participants are obeying the rules beyond reviewing projects applied for the program.

However controversial that all may sound, Valve are being absolutely clear about what players should expect from Early Access. Many a time have we been reminded that we are buying a product that is not yet complete and should be ready to play a game at its current state and not for some features that may or may not appear in the future. And as it happens in development, especially with small indie studios with no publisher to help them out financially, some projects get cancelled or turn out failures that nobody wants to play.

On the other hand, if Valve had set out solid boundaries and meaningful consequences for crossing them, maybe there wouldn’t be so many cases of developers abandoning a project and going silent or controversies like the release of paid expansion pack for ARK: Survival Evolved. The bottom line is, think critically before buying an Early Access game, because it always comes with a risk.