If you’ve paid attention to Steam releases recently, you may have noticed a large number of titles are missing their proposed release dates. While some of these can be chalked up to developer delays, a large portion of them are due to Valve’s approval process.
To release a game on Steam, Valve must go through and approve it. Outside of major proven developers, which leads to instances such as when Ubisoft released a game without an exe, games are tested by Valve to make sure they work and don’t include any malware.
As the number of Steam releases continues to increase, which is only exacerbated by the ongoing flood of AI slop games, Valve has now fallen severely behind on game approvals. This means that multiple games with thousands of wishlists have been forced to delay their release dates as the approval process takes more than double the amount of time it used to.
In an update on Steamworks, Valve admitted that the team has fallen behind on approvals. “We aim to test every game built in a timely manner, typically within 3/5 days,” the company said. “However, we’re running a little behind right now and taking up to 12 business days.”
Valve revealed that the increase in wait time right now is due to two factors. Not only has there been “a significant increase in submissions”, but the team is also having to constantly re-approve games. This means that titles are being submitted, failing approval, and are then submitted again. As the AI slop wave continues, correlation would suggest that a number of these games are failing approval and are slowing down Steam releases as a result.
“Much of that delay is due to having to re-review games, which isn’t great for you or for us,” Steam said. However, Valve has introduced a new checklist that will allow developers to submit better applications that will reduce the need to constantly resubmit their games.
For example, one of these new rules is to “run your game through Steam for at least five minutes” to make sure it works. Surprisingly, many of these applications have not done that. Valve wrote: “Believe it or not, sometimes we review builds that have not ever 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.”
The checklist also makes developers confirm what common redistributables, such as DirectX, their game needs, whether or not achievements work, if cloud saves are supported, and whether or not they meet the five screenshot minimum for a released store page. All of these may sound basic, but the fact that this checklist has been created means a lot of games are simply failing to hit these requirements.
While Valve hasn’t publicly commented on it, this is likely the result of massive swarms of AI created games hitting the storefront. Itch.io, an indie storefront alternative, was recently pushed to introduce AI filters and delete “terabytes” of AI-made games due to high amounts of spam as game pages were doubled while purchases and downloads were not.
The AI problem is more than just a matter of discoverability as well. The more games shovelled out with the technology, the more Steam’s servers have to hold, and with memory prices as they are, that capacity is always a worry. Sure, a few thousand tiny AI games won’t make a dent, but when thousands are releasing every month, that will become a major issue.
