It would definitely help filter out bad faith early access games from projects by indie devs who genuinely need the funding to continue development.

I think restricting the ability to modify that date once set and showing all previous dates if they get bumped would make this a really useful tool.

It's niche, but it lets them get the best of both worlds. Even when a company does early access right, a lot of people would rather wait for the complete game.

This would let them refine and build up with early access, then get a significant boost at their proper release.

I feel like I've seen it before, but maybe that was just listings for full games that were available for wishlist/preorder prior to release. The article says there was no official place for a 1.0 early access release in the system prior to this.