Monkey's placeholder Steam date told shoppers the VR game had already launched

The Steam listing for Monkey, a VR-only multiplayer game from Two Armed Baboons, spent part of September 30 telling shoppers the game had come out when it had not. The developer said so in a store announcement at 18:23 UTC that day: "On the steam page it put our placeholder release date which was not meant to be there, we forgot to change it to later and it told to everyone that monkey is coming out TODAY, which sadly it is not."

Monkey is tagged VR Only on Steam, and its listing currently shows no price. | Image: Two Armed Baboons Image: Two Armed Baboons

Correcting it was not in the studio's hands, by its own account. "Steam is not letting me update the release date, its lowkey annoying, but on release we will do a 40% discount, sorry about this," the same post says, before adding: "We wish we could release monkey onto steam RIGHT NOW but we literally cant, extremely sorry.." That is the developer's account of the cause rather than a description of how Steam works, and Valve has not commented on the listing.

The page now gives a year and no price

The date has since been replaced. Steam's US store data for app 2640020, read at 21:26 UTC on October 3, still flags the listing as coming soon, gives the release date as "2026" and carries no price at all. Nothing from the studio or from Valve says who replaced the placeholder, or when.

So the shopper's position is simpler than it looked on September 30, and no more useful. There is no day to put in a calendar, no price to compare, and the promised 40% cut has no list price to come off, because the listing carries none. Monkey is tagged "VR Only" on Steam, so a headset is not optional, which is less common than it sounds: only eight of Steam's 25 best-selling VR games need one.

Anticheat work is the developer's reason for the delay

The studio has been promising a Steam release since August 21, and its own posts set a far looser timetable than the placeholder implied. The August 21 announcement says the team "should be able to release on steam in the coming months, but it will be by Q1 2027".

Three days later it gave the reason for the wait: "The reason we arent just on steam right now is because we have to improve our anticheat services so that players cant just crash peoples games, etc." The same August 24 post adds: "We think we can release the game in the next month!", an estimate that has since come and gone.

The studio then posted three times inside 24 hours. After the September 30 apology, the studio asked players at 02:29 UTC on October 1 what should be exclusive to the Steam version, and returned at 18:08 UTC the same day to point them to a free version elsewhere: "we're also on meta quest devices for free". That post also pulls a feature out of the Steam build, saying "we do have to delay screen mode though", a mode it says some players had been waiting for.

The date is the one line shoppers act on

For part of September 30 the page said a game was available that nobody could buy. Monkey is free on Quest by the developer's account, so anyone who went looking after reading the Steam page was not stuck, but the Steam version is not flagged as free, and it is the one meant to carry the discount.

That leaves the studio's own account as the only explanation on record. For now the page offers a single year, 2026, and no way to buy the game.