How this site works

Everything here comes from Steam's public store and community data. Nothing is typed in by hand, and nothing is estimated.

Which games are covered

Steam lists 11,082 released games under its Early Access genre. Most have very few players, so this site concentrates on the ones people are playing: a game is tracked once it reaches 50 players at the same time during a week. Right now that is 449 games, and each has its own page. A game that has a page keeps it, even if its player count later falls.

Updates

Developers post on Steam and choose a kind for each post. A post counts as an update when its developer filed it as a small update or patch notes, a regular update or a major update. Some developers file their patch notes as ordinary news, so a news post whose title reads like patch notes (it mentions a patch, a hotfix, a changelog or a version number such as 0.4.2) counts as well. Other posts, such as sales, events and development diaries, are listed separately and do not count.

The newest posts of every tracked game are read once a day. The number of updates in 90 days, and the typical gap between updates over the past year (the median, so one long break does not distort it), are worked out from those posts.

What the labels mean

Label	Meaning
Active	An update was posted in the last 30 days.
Slowing	The last update was posted 31 to 90 days ago.
Quiet	The last update was posted 91 to 180 days ago.
Silent	No update has been posted for more than 180 days.
No update posts	None of the game's recent posts count as an update.
Left early access	Steam no longer lists the game as early access.

A label describes what has been posted on Steam and nothing more. A developer can be hard at work without posting, can post on Discord or their own site instead, or can ship small fixes without notes. A long silence is a reason to look closer before buying, not proof that a game has been abandoned.

Time in early access

Counted from the day the game was released into Early Access on Steam. When a game leaves early access, the date Steam stopped listing it as early access is recorded, to the day this site noticed.

Players

Steam publishes how many people are playing each game at this moment. Tracked games are sampled every hour, and the lists show the highest sample of the last 24 hours. This is the number of people in the game on Steam, not sales or owners. Player history on this site goes back 1 day; week-on-week changes and a list of rising games appear once there are 14 days to compare.

Reviews and prices

Review counts and the share that are positive are Steam's own figures for all languages. Prices are in US dollars.

Use the data

The tracked games are available as one file, free to reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0): CSV or JSON.