Valve explains why it's running behind on Steam game approvals, asks developers to perform basic release checks to prevent re-reviews

In the wake of witnessing an unprecedented number of game submissions to Steam over the last few months, Valve has been forced to delay approvals in order to deal with the existing backlog.

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In the wake of witnessing an unprecedented number of game submissions to Steam over the last few months, Valve has been forced to delay approvals in order to deal with the existing backlog.

Following complaints by game developers on social media and elsewhere, Valve has now responded to explain why it's taking longer to get games approved. The short version: re-reviews are clogging up the system.

"We aim to test every game build in a timely manner, typically within three-five business days," Valve wrote in a Steam post. "However, we're running a little behind right now and taking up to 12 business days. Much of that delay is due to having to re-review games, which isn't great for you or for us."

As Valve explained in the post, games need to be re-reviewed when they're rejected for missing key quality assurance checks. In an effort to make it easier for developers to get it right the first time, Valve updated the Steam release checklist to include new, tighter requirements.

These include a requirement to run the game through Steam for at least five minutes. According to Valve, some of the games submitted have not been played through Steam.

"This means that even if a game runs smoothly when a dev launches their executable directly, they might have missed basic steps that would impact a user installing and playing via Steam," Valve explained.

Valve is also making it a rule to mention whether the game requires common redistributables such as DirectX, Visual C++, .NET, XNA. While Steam can automatically install many common redistributables, it needs to know which ones are needed (if any). There are also new rules about achievement readiness, cloud save detection, and some updates to Steam store page requirements.

"We now surface some of the most common issues we see missed, along with asking for some information to help our reviewers from the start," Valve added. "For example, if your game offers multiple languages and you've indicated that on your store page, we'll ask you to ensure you've included them in your build".

While Valve did not directly name gen-AI as a potential reason for this rise in the number of poor submissions, it's clear the Steam company needs to find a way to deal with the massive number of AI-assisted games.

Valve recently addressed Steam's AI game cloning problem by suggesting developers make their games less copyable. Incidentally, some of the developers whose game approvals are delayed now fear their games will be cloned by others using gen-AI and land a Steam page before the original article has made it out of submission.