How early is 'too early' for Steam Early Access?

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

It’s definitely Friday, GameDiscoverCo newsletter subs - which means we’re coming at you with a whole heap of info. And this week on Steam has been pretty interesting, with a whopping 12 games debuting with at least 1,000 concurrents on the platform.

So we thought we’d start things off by looking at one particular release - post-apocalyptic extraction shooter The Forever Winter - which got a ton of interest on release - >12,500 CCUs worth, but is making us ask the following question….

How early is ‘too early’ for Steam Early Access?

As you may recall from our Steam ‘trending unreleased games’ chart from Monday, Fun Dog Studios’ The Forever Winter was arriving with a lot of buzz. Videos like this one from Riloe (2.9 million views!) on why the grimdark game was an ‘anti-shooter’ - dystopian and anti-war vibes abound - caught the imagination of the public.

But the game has ended up stumbling - at least on its initial Early Access release - into an ‘expectation vs. reality’ trap, with some players disappointed about a) certain gameplay mechanics, and b) the general state of the game. Why? Here’s reasons:

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