The founder of the analytical service GameDiscoverCo, Simon Carless, examined how the release of games on Steam unfolded after leaving Early Access in 2025. He discovered that the majority of them failed to surpass their initial performance.
Supermarket Simulator
Important: Carless excluded from the statistics those games whose sales in Early Access did not reach at least 5,000 copies, as well as games with extremely low and high metrics.
According to GameDiscoverCo, only 20% of games generated more revenue in the first 30 days after their release in 2025 than they did in the first month of their Early Access. In total, there were 45 such titles. The rest saw lower release revenue compared to their initial appearance on Steam in the Early Access format.
For example, one of the games with a significantly less successful release compared to its Early Access phase is Supermarket Simulator. As Carless notes, the launch revenue of its version 1.0 was immediately 95% less than the revenue at the beginning of Early Access. Revenues also dropped significantly for Backpack Battles (-87%) and Slime Rancher 2 (-85%).
As a counterexample, Carless mentioned News Tower, Mars First Logistics, and Escape The Backrooms — each of them managed to more than double their revenue.
Overall, GameDiscoverCo’s statistics showed that in 2025, the median revenue of games on Steam for the release month was only 40% of the median revenue for their first month of Early Access.
“I do think the concept that a slow launch can be ‘redeemed by a 1.0 release’ is increasingly out of step with reality. Your 1.0 debut is really another notification to wishlisters and marketing ‘beat’, right? So if it’s a major upgrade & you’ve discounted seldom, it may be a bigger deal. But it’s perhaps over-rated as a state change in Steam?” concluded Carless.