How active are Early Access games?
Public builds and developer posts across our recorded Steam catalogue.
Without observed activity
Cumulative windows across the 13,740 covered games.
Snapshot · Cached for up to an hour.
No observed activity does not establish abandonment. Developer posts can include announcements rather than patches.
We include Steam games currently labelled Early Access in GaugeDB’s genre records, excluding coming-soon games and future release dates. This is a changing catalogue cohort, not a census or a historical Early Access cohort.
The build date comes from Steam’s current public branch timestamp, not when GaugeDB first discovered a build. Beta branches, password-protected branches and missing-token responses do not establish public build activity. Developer posts use the latest recorded Steam news item marked official. External press coverage is excluded; official announcements, sales posts and other non-patch news can still count.
A game needs a valid public build and successful build/news checks within seven days. Matching complete Steam revision checks count even when the build is unchanged. A verified complete news history with no recorded developer posts counts as checked; it does not invent a post date. Unchecked sources, incomplete news history, invalid dates and overdue checks remain insufficient data.
We compare the more recent of the two source dates with six, twelve and twenty-four calendar months before the snapshot, in UTC. A date exactly on the boundary is included. A recent post or public build removes a game from longer inactivity windows when the cached data refreshes.
No observed activity is not proof that development has stopped. Updates outside Steam, private development and collection gaps are not measured. These figures do not estimate abandonment, completion probability or time spent in Early Access; the store release date does not reliably identify Early Access entry.