You may have noticed that the release date for Starfield on Steam (opens in new tab) was recently changed from a vague "2023" to a vague and completely unspecific "coming soon". In fact, this is just one of several games that have had their release dates changed today: others that can be found on SteamDB include Forspoken (open in new tab), Redfall (open in new tab), Ark 2 (open in new tab), Robocop: Rogue City (open in new tab).

The good news is that there is nothing to worry about. Well, probably nothing anyway: in October 2022 (opens in new tab), Valve changed the way it handles release dates for upcoming games. Prior to that, release dates on the Steam store page were the Wild West: some games listed exact dates, some listed rough dates like month and year, and some listed joking statements like "When it's done."

"The current hodgepodge of upcoming indications leaves a lot to be desired," Valve wrote at the time. 'Some information is missing or incomplete. Worst of all, the custom text field we provided had no localization support, creating a confusing and inconsistent experience for players around the world. Ad hoc jokes and references are not translated and date descriptions vary from place to place.

"For example, take the string 5/8/2023: ...... Is that May 8 or August 5?" It depends on the country you live in.

To address these shortcomings, Valve has introduced five options that developers can select and switch between, each with a "localized, regionally familiar display":

To handle how these dates are displayed in the list of upcoming games In order to do so, launch targets other than a specific date will be displayed with the last possible date within that time range. For example, if a game is scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2023, it will be sorted as if the release date is March 31; if it is simply 2023, Steam will treat it as if the release date is December 31. Essentially, this is an automatic placeholder date. Also, if there is no date at all, it will appear after all other games with a specific date or launch target.

The current expectation is that Starfield will be released in the first half of this year, but the date on Steam is listed as 2023, so the release date is treated as if it were December 31. It is reasonable to assume that Bethesda does not want that, but they also do not want to release the date too soon.

Another theory, which is a bit of a stretch, is this: in an October 2022 update, Valve warned that games with release dates that did not meet the new standard would automatically be set to "coming soon" at 12:00 a.m. PT on January 1. Bethesda did nothing and missed the deadline. It is possible that Valve did not actually take steps to set the date to "coming soon" because they were not really paying attention. As I said, it's a stretch, but Steam isn't the only product page that developers have to maintain for their games.

Whatever the case may be, other games have made similar changes before, presumably to comply with Steam's new release date policy: for example, "Nightingale" (opens in new tab) was added on December 8, "Scheduled for release in H1 2023 - wish list to the "Wish List! to "coming soon" on December 8. We have contacted Bethesda and Steam about this change and will update if we hear back.