How we read updates

Only the posts Steam itself marks as game updates: patches, fixes and new content. We never guess an update from a post’s title — a headline reading “Patch 1.4 is live” on an unmarked post is not counted, and neither is a sale announcement that happens to mention one.

Fixes released within the same week count as one update. A burst of hotfixes around a release is one event; counted separately, the gap between updates collapses to a couple of days and every game looks overdue ever after.

The record starts in 2019, because that is when Steam began labelling announcements. Of the posts we hold from 2012–2018, almost none carry a type. Counting that era would draw years of silence that never happened.

One game ships every four months; another patched weekly for two years. An average across the catalogue would call the first one abandoned and the second one fine, and both readings would be wrong.

So we take the gaps between a game’s own updates and use the middle one — the typical wait, not the average, which one long pause would drag. Then we divide the current silence by it. A game that usually waits 14 days and has waited 70 is at five times its own pace; so is a game that usually waits a year and has waited five of them.

A game needs at least five updates, four of them far enough apart to show a pattern, spread over at least a month, before we will claim a pace at all. Below that the honest answer is “not enough history”, and that is what the card says.

The bands are set on that ratio, so they mean the same thing for a game patched weekly and one patched yearly.

• Updated regularlyThe last update came about when expected.
• Updated on scheduleA little later than usual. Still normal.
• Updates are slowingClearly longer than usual since the last one — about twice the gap it keeps.
• Quiet for a whileFour times its own pace or more. Worth keeping an eye on.
• Looks abandonedAn unfinished game that has had nothing for ten times its own pace.
• No longer updatedAn online game at the same silence — one that only works while someone keeps it running.

The last two are only used where silence is a warning: games that are not finished yet, and online games that need somebody there. A finished single-player game going quiet is finished, not abandoned.

A released game is expected to stop getting updates one day. Calling The Witcher 3 abandoned would be the site being wrong, so once a finished game has gone quiet, its line says when it last shipped — in its own colour, which is neither a warning nor a blank.

• No updates since Dec 2022Finished and no longer updated. Not a warning.
• Last update Sep 2023Too few updates to see a pattern, so just the date.
• Last post Jun 2026The studio posts news but does not mark updates on Steam, so there is no pattern — only when it last said something.
• Not enough historyEither too little to judge, or nothing fetched for this game yet. We say so rather than guess.

The line is how many updates came out in each stretch of time — months for a young game, quarters once it is older. Its height goes by the square root of the count, so one launch burst cannot flatten six steady years into a line along the floor.

Blue is Early Access. The dashed line is the full release, and the dot at the end is now. Hover anywhere along it — or use the arrow keys — to see the count for that stretch.

A studio’s line sums up its games in exactly the same words, counted over the ones with enough history. Only an unfinished game can be left behind: a studio that shipped a game and moved on has not abandoned anything, and its page says so.

The other half of the record is what a studio does finish. A game with at least three labelled updates before its release date came through Early Access and reached 1.0 — one or two would be betas and store re-listings.

Some studios never let Steam label an update. One well-known game shipped a title update filed as plain news; guessing that from a headline is exactly what this site refuses to do. Where a studio marks few of its posts, the game’s page says so beside the chart, and the verdict is held back rather than drawn from paperwork.

Nothing here measures quality, player counts or whether a game is worth buying. It measures one thing: whether somebody is still shipping updates for it. Everything else on a page — the price, the review share — is Steam’s own and is labelled as such.