tl;dr: List game after 6 months without updates, make clear if staff or private branches are active, list as effectively abandoned after 12 months without updates regardless of staff or private branch activity. Yay/Nay?
http://www.strawpoll.me/11250510

The poll[www.strawpoll.me] in the last announcement was surprisingly even. As in, 64 to 63 for the first question, and 48 to 47 for the second. After thinking it it all over as to what the goal was with listing games like that, what were reasonable time frames, how we could factor in things like the devs posting info but not pushing updates, or only pushing updates on private branches, and everyones opinion as to how to handle it, I'm hoping I've come to a pretty reasonable solution on the matter.

First off, what I'm trying to achieve by listing a game for not updating. I'm not trying to be the judge as to if an update is "good enough" or not, that's entirely outside of the scope of this curator group. All I check for is that there have been any changes at all to the public branch of the game. When you're buying an Early Access game, I assume that you're interested in seeing it finished at some point, and finishing a game requires that game to actually get updates. To that end, all I'm trying to do is to help give people a heads up so that they can make an informed decision on what they're supporting.

Now, as for how I was wording the reviews before, which was "Seemingly abandoned EAG...", looking back, that's a bit more harsh of a wording than I should probably be using. I don't think it's entirely wrong to say, but the situation could be more accurately conveyed. As the poll and the comments have made clear, plenty of folks are willing to forgive slow updates if the devs are being up front about the situation. I don't believe that expecting a paltry 2 updates a year from an incomplete game being offered for sale to tens of millions of people(Steam peaked at over 12 million people online in the past 48 hours) is unreasonable, even for just a hobbyist dev, but flat out saying that the project seems abandoned may not be accurate in all cases.

To that end, how do you guys feel about listing games that haven't had any public game updates for 6 months, but either making it clear that private branches are still receiving changes, and/or that staff are still active in the community, and then if a game hasn't received any public updates for a year, stating that it's effectively abandoned, despite active staff and/or active private branch development? Here are some examples:

• Public development appears stalled, with no updates between July 1st, 2016 and December 31st, 2016. Staff remain active in the community.
  
• Public development appears stalled, with no updates from 2016-06-01 to 2016-12-31. Private branches still being updated, and staff are still active.
  
• Public development appears stalled, with no updates between 2016-06-01 and 2016-12-31, although private branches are still receiving development.
  
• Game is seemingly abandoned, having had no information from devs or game updates between July 1st, 2016 and December 31st, 2016.
  
• Game is effectively abandoned, having not received any public updates between 2016-06-01 and 2016-12-31, despite active staff and private branch.

Please note that when I say active in the community, I'm only referring to Steam. If a staff member for a developer/publisher is posting news on the games page, or on the games forums, that would count, but if they're only posting on their Twitter and Facebook pages, and those pages aren't listed in recent news posts or stickied on the forum, I'm not going to factor that in. If the game is being sold on Steam, it's the companies responsibility to make information available to the Steam users, not the users responsibility to try to hunt down the devs to find available info.

So, what do you guys think? Is this a good way to handle the situation, or is there a better way to do it? As usual, please vote on the poll!
http://www.strawpoll.me/11250510/




P.S. As I mentioned last post, we're coming up on a season that tends to have multiple Steam sales, which is a time that the information this group provides could really help people out! If you know of anyone who you think might appreciate a heads up, please link them to the curator page! If everyone who followed the curator page told one friend about us, we would move from page #12 of the top curators to within the first 10 pages! The less pages people have to dig through when looking for new curators to follow, the more likely they are to find us organically rather than just by word of mouth!