Left 4 Dead creator says he'll never do Early Access again: "SteamDB will say we have 1 player yesterday - we have 10,000"

Left 4 Dead writer and Valve veteran Chet Faliszek says he'll never launch a game in Early Access again.

In a post on LinkedIn, Faliszek explained that he's steering clear of this method when it comes to future games due to how player counts are measured by Steam and third-party sites. Faliszek argues that the numbers shown don't accurately reflect how many players the game has.

According to the developer, the figures for The Anacrusis, the co-op FPS from Stray Bombay - a studio he co-founded with Riot Games' Kimberly Voll – are way off. "SteamDB will say we have 1 player yesterday, we have 10,000," he says. He notes that crossplay will skew the numbers somewhat but that it's also down to how those figures are counted for small games.

"That stat gets thrown out every time we do an update, any time anyone mentions us," Faliszek explains. "There is some small number of people on Steam who just instantly want to post - Dead Game and then state a stat sheet from SteamDB not just on our game, but any game that is under the threshold for the real numbers to be counted... and instead a number is synthesized on bad data and always amazingly low." 

This, the developer says, works against smaller releases, hampering their ability to grow their playerbase, which flies in the face of what Early Access was designed for. When it comes to future games, Faliszek says, "It will be closed beta all the way."

Update - November 28: In a follow-up comment, Faliszek clarified: "It's not SteamDB or Steamstats etc. that is inaccurate, but the data they are pulling is. That API call wasn't designed to be used for showing the the active [concurrent users] – which is different from how the stats are shown/pulled when displayed by Steam directly." 

The Anacrusis launched in Early Access almost two years ago, in January 2022, and in that time, Stray Bombay has released a whopping 56 updates, adding new weapons, maps, and modes, as well as quality-of-life and player-requested features to the sci-fi shooter. A full release is planned for December 5, 2023.

For more games to play together, check out our guide to the best co-op games.