Chet Faliszek (Former Valve employee, CEO of Stray Bombay): We will never do Early Access again.

I get how that could be demoralizing for the team but I think the vast majority of users don’t look at steamdb or care about it. I think I’ve looked once or twice and only for bigger games.

This may sound dumb, and I'll google it in a second, but idk what steamdb is.

Edit: ok, it's a stats website or something? idk why this would be useful to the average player or the dev is upset. I don't need to know how many people are playing XYZ game. Maybe I just play weird, indie stuff so that player count isn't ever going to be a useful ranking metric, but why would a player care?
- For competitive multiplayer games, there's some minimum threshold of active players required for the experience to work. If there aren't enough users, the chances that you'll find a game with a reasonable skill gap and latency go way down.
- Steamdb is useful for a couple different reasons. It shows you more stats than just the number of players, it also shows the price history and what's on sale (you can filter only the games at a historic low price for the best deals), when a game was released and last updated (great to see if it's an abandoned game), some other cool stuff that players might like to check before buying a game.
  
  I usually go there during the seasonal sales and it helps save me money after seeing that most games have been that price before so it can probably wait until I actually have money haha

On the "dead game" thing: I have been noticing recently that much of the people who have said this or that is dead have literally only been concerned with the streaming popularity of said game. People are very much still playing, but nobody is interested in watching those people play it, so to anyone who is only interested in making money by streaming a popular game, it's dead. Doesn't matter if the game still has like 100,000 concurrent players at the time.

I've seen my fair share of people calling games like Legends of Runeterra dead because of streaming numbers despite being insanely popular. Some games just don't lend well to streaming, and it's stupid some people are using it as a metric.
- The negativity is sort of infectious too. I just picked up Runeterra for the first time since last year. Last time I was playing, I was starting to second guess myself about buying the event pass because of all the dead game rhetoric. Why invest any time and money into the game if it turns out their right and the game ends up being shut down?
  
  Streaming metrics are dumb. I love the game, but just thinking about watching someone stream it puts me to sleep.

In my mind Early Access is for games that are so close to completion that they can ask for money and withstand criticism.

It should go:

Alpha (closed or open)
Beta (closed and/or open)
Early Access
Full Release

If your game suffers in Early Access then it likely means your game wasn't ready for Early Access. Too often a game that should still be in Closed Alpha or Closed Beta is thrown up on Steam as Early Access. If you're gonna do that then you have to take the criticism as well.

I agree with closed beta, but for a different reason: I hate beta testing software. I don't have time for that anymore. Maybe if I was in my 20's or younger. I only want complete games, relatively bug free.

I think that it works well for games that have very long development cycles where a lot of that development cycle is tweaking. Think of something like Dwarf Fortress.
- Yeah except that Dwarf Fortress was a complete game for years and free. Under the hood it's the same game, it only costs money now if you're getting the better graphics and music added.
- I think with BG3 it worked quiet well as well. It let the devs get feedback on the game mechanics, but limited the story so that the full release still offers something new. It was a good demo, that let people see the direction of the game. And it also let people get familiar with the game engine so modding tools and some release compatible mods where available very early after the release, that allowed to customize the game experience somewhat.
  
  I have not read anyone serious stating that the game was dead, while it was in early access, but maybe because that is a bigger title.

I agree with closed beta, but for different reasons.

There will always be "dead game" trolls that will find some statistic to back themselves up. Trying to hide from them isn't going to solve the real problem, though I guess it'll solve how mouthy they can get during development, rather than after release.

I can't imagine how rough it would be to pour hours and hours into a passion project only for a vocal minority to be constantly posting irrelevant criticism.

It's gotta be demoralizing.

Literally all of the posts on Steam discussion boards that say "dead game" are farming those clown trophies to gain points in Steam.

Just go through any game news and you'll see them everywhere

Can somebody explain why the stats would be showing 1 player if there's 10k? How much of what he's saying is hyperbole?

Yeah, well, for my game I'm doing a closed full release. 😎

Sorry, maybe it's just me, but the gameplay video looks aggressively boring. Most of the reviews have quite low playtimes, too. I daresay the actual player count was closer to 1 than 10,000 by orders of magnitude.