Valve Pulls Steam Early Access From Steam Early Access

Following yet another glitch-filled and incomplete game that should never have been published in the first placed being removed from it, Valve announced they have officially pulled Steam Early Access from Steam Early Access. Up to this point, Steam Early Access has meant giving gamers the chance to pay for games as they’re being created to help support the developers, but due to several failures it has come under fire as of late.
Such failures of Steam Early Access date back to last year's disaster with The War Z, which Valve admits should have never been added to Steam Early Access in the first place. The most recent glitch occurred when the Early Access software somehow allowed an indie game called Towns to be added to its database and sold to more than 200,000 customers before the developers announced production on the game would be halted. Something Valve says should not have happened.

“We left it up to the developers of Steam Early Access to determine how the program works and the pricing model,” said Valve CEO Gabe Newell in a blog post announcing the removal of the service from Steam Early Access. While Steam Early Access is loaded with glitches and mostly a ripoff, according to the developers the initial plan was to have it eventually fixed once the service had enough customers similar to most games on Steam Early Access. As months and years eventually passed and Early Access went unfixed, Valve decided it was finally time to pull the plug and remove it from Steam Early Access.

“Steam Early Access is meant to give consumers a way to support games that have a chance at being finished,” the blog post read, “We have a responsibility to users of Steam Early Access to keep the quality of products available on the service. Because of this, we felt the need to remove Steam Early Access from it as it was not meeting these expectations.” 

The biggest factor in remove Steam Early Access from Steam Early Access was no doubt the backlash it received from several YouTube personalities. In a video breakdown from consumer advocate TotalBiscuit, the British video game critic tore the service apart. In one section of his video he showed how he was actually able to purchase a completely broken game from Steam Early Access and was expected to pay $20 for it. 

"You see, that is exactly why this massive tsunami of shit needs to be removed from Steam Early Access," he ranted in his video, "People deserve better than to be subjected to such utter garbage that is this flagrantly broken Steam Early Access game. And if you give even the tiniest amount of fuck about it, you will let Valve know they need to remove it from Steam Early Access immediately." 

The outrage among Steam users that prompted the removal have has mostly died down as the majority of them agree with Valve’s decision to remove Steam Early Access from Steam Early Access.

“That thing was a complete mess,” Steam user Gabe3Confirmed69 said, “I go on Steam Early Access to support developers that are making independent games, not support a completely broken game like that Steam Early Access thing.” Other users shared the same sentiment, with many of them wondering why Steam Early Access was even allowed on Steam Early Access in the first place. As ThinkWithThisPortal69 said, “The developers knew Steam Early Access was a broken ripoff to begin with, why did Valve allow them to put it on Steam Early Access?”

So far there has been no word on if Steam Greenlight has been greenlit on Steam Greenlight, but we remain optimistic.