Few videogame marketing terms are more aggravatingly ambiguous than "early access." Most painfully, it can refer to two very different scenarios: Sometimes it means putting an in-development game on sale before it's done, and other times it means offering access to a finished game early, typically as a deluxe edition preorder bonus. Starfield offered several days of "early access" with its Premium Edition, for instance.
Steam, the platform responsible for popularizing the first meaning of early access, has had enough. It's now designating the latter scenario, when a developer offers pre-launch access to a completed game, "Advanced Access."
