The amount of new games being submitted for review to Steam has gotten so unmanageable that Valve has announced changes to how games need to be vetted in pre-release.
Valve says it has “seen a significant increase in submissions for store page and build review in recent months, and have spent the last several weeks working to scale our process to match it.” A set of newly announced changes are “designed to help more developers pass build review the first time, and cut down on re-reviews for basic functional issues.”
While a good amount of this influx of new games are likely made with generative AI or “AI slop” as we’ve all come to know it (as evidenced by data showing that almost half of all new Steam games in October used the generative AI tag), it’s still a process that could use some streamlining regardless, especially considering Valve itself needs to play games before approving them.
“We’ve heard from a lot of developers and know how stressful it’s been having to wait for review build updates longer than expected,” Valve said in a new community post last night. “More improvements are coming to the build review process, but these initial changes are a great starting point. “
These new changes in the pre-release checklist now include confirming any required common redistributables, confirming achievements are ready, requiring five screenshots categorized as gameplay, and the most interesting one: running the game through Steam for at least five minutes, so Valve itself doesn’t have to have one of its own teams do it.
“Believe it or not, sometimes we review builds that have not ever been played through Steam,” Valve said. “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 release checklist now requires some Steam playtime before submitting for review, which will help ensure that a game has configured launch options correctly and included the necessary content depots.”
