Offworld Trading Company's Early Access Postmortem from Soren Johnson

I agree with all the points about what Steam could do better. Had these been in place I predict Offworld (and Ashes) would have better steam reviews and more players. Early Access should be only for devotees who will give the game a fair shake and are willing to take some pre-release hiccups in stride. That would mean less feedback, but frankly most feedback that makes its way into the game comes from devotees anyway.

If there is concern a game release goes quietly, there is a possible solution. Within a couple weeks after release allow people who have not purchased the game play for a free weekend. A "try before you buy". You may get many negative reviews during that period, but at least those people are reviewing a finished product that has had a couple weeks of post-release patches. And if those people like the game they can then buy it, boosting the playerbase.

Nicolas Gadenne, creator of "Dig or Die" posted a reply disagreeing with "No early access reviews", saying that most people aren't too critical during early access. While true for most, if even as few as 1 out of every 10 do no abide this, that's an automatic 10% drop in rating, and that may be enough to kill the game. He is also comparing his $8 2D platformer to your $40 game. People are willing to accept less of a complete game if they only pay $8. So if anything the developer should have the option to disable early access reviews, and I'd be willing to bet development teams that are really involving players in the development process are likely to exercise that option.

A problem with those early reviews is that some people, who even fully understand that they reviewed an unfinished product and gave a negative review realising the game will change simply forget to update/remove their review. Either removing the old reviews or splitting them from post-release somehow would do the game more service imo.

Personally, I think splitting the reviews is the answer.  During the early access period and for very early buying decisions, the early access reviews have some value.  However, being able to see just the post-release review scores, and having only those used in metrics would be better, both for games that have fixed their early access issues and (for the sake of consumers) for those games that got positive early access reviews because of their promise but released in a very messy state.

I personally don't think people should be able to give reviews if they have played less than 2 hours of a game.

I like the write up. Steam becoming resistant to Devs selling the game directly from their own website and not via Steam is a bit concerning.

I like the suggestions regarding EA but I would be surprised if any of them come any time soon. Stopping refunds in early access, that is a bold one and would certainly scare off casual players who wouldn't have given the game a fair chance. Were it to  be implemented it would only take one game which sold really well in EA but turned out to be terrible or to get terrible support for Steam to backtrack on it though. Is it even possible to implement that? I thought laws, especially in the EU forced Steam to offer refunds in first place.

Good points.

Will be interesting to see if Steam sees any reason to adapt; being market leader is a comfortable position.
Technically it should not be difficult to separate early access from release reviews. One option would be to restrict considered reviews during early access to a time interval to reflect current state. Definitely separate them from release reviews unless player has spent time with this version and renews the review.

Finding the right players is really tough; agree with Soren that Steam does a bad job here with expectation management. EA is even less then a public beta, many players don't get it.
Better turn around times are key to keeping your players happy. Those who want to help shape a game take a lot of placeholders, if they feel their input has meaning and impact. If players chew for weeks on a dated version and are subsequently mostly ignored by devs, their motivation will evaporate.
So the intention of finding a smaller but dedicated group is correct; speeding up release cycles. A danger here is that these players become veterans too, with similar blindness issues as the dev team.