Steam Is Tightening Its Game Submission Rules As AI Slop Floods The Store

Valve currently has a review backlog on Steam, as the mandatory QA check every game must pass before launch on the platform has reportedly seen wait times balloon from a few days to over two weeks. The problem appears to be a massive number of builds, thought to be AI slop, that fail basic technical checks and are sent back for re-reviews, gumming up the works. To make headway and reduce back-and-forth friction, Valve has announced it's tightening the rules on what developers must verify before submitting builds. According to Valve, developers must ensure their games can run through Steam for at least five minutes, since the platform often receives builds that have never launched through Steam. Developers must also explicitly state whether their game requires common components like DirectX, Visual C++, or .NET so Steam knows to install them automatically, and, if advertised, prove that cloud saves work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB0C8z2j6nA On top of that, Steam will run automated checks to flag broken or incomplete achievements, and it will enforce stricter image categories. This is to ensure that players aren't misled by non-gameplay images posing as screenshots. Finally, dynamic reminders will pop up in the submission portal to nudge developers to deliver the content they originally promised. Is this a response to a flood of AI slop content on Steam lately? Valve didn't directly refer to that content, but as the recent Next Fest proved, mass-produced asset flips and AI-generated shovelware were everywhere. Content like that could be choking Steam's manual review queue, and indie game platform Itch.io addressed it this week with new guidelines for submitting games. Requiring developers to prove they've actually booted up their game and tested basic features through Steam could bring the review process back to manageable times, but it's not a silver bullet for the bad actors out there. Developers can voluntarily disclose that AI assisted in some form in building a game, and according to Game Discovery Tool , more than 50% of the games released on Steam last month included that disclosure. The issue has been highlighted by several studios and developers recently, including Food Devils game director Alfred Camon , who revealed that the Steam Early Access launch date for the game had been postponed after waiting over three weeks without build approval, and Wheel Make It publisher 2 Left Thumbs detailed how they missed their launch window by two weeks because of minor build rejections that sent them back to the end of an increasingly congested queue. The developer behind Lacey's Flash Games also posted an official release update revealing a multi-day delay due to Steam's build verification pipeline.