Valve’s target for reviewing new Steam games is three to five days. Reviews are currently taking as long as 12 business days, and indie developers are blowing past their own launch dates as a result, in some cases by weeks.
To clear that backlog, Valve has rolled out new release rules. It hasn’t explained what caused the pileup. Developers think they know.
Valve’s fix: play your game through Steam before submitting
The main change is a simple one. Developers must now run their game through Steam for a minimum of five minutes to confirm it works on the platform.
You’d expect that to happen already. According to Valve, though, it has been reviewing builds that nobody ever played through Steam. When that happens, “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.”
Those builds fail review and are returned to the developer. Valve said the new rules are partly meant to cut down on these re-reviews, which are driving the longer waits.
The new submission checklist
Before submitting, developers also need to confirm common redistributables such as DirectX and Visual C++. They must make sure achievements are ready and that Steam Cloud save paths are set up correctly.
Every screenshot also has to be tagged with a category: gameplay, menus, concept art or cinematics.
In a community post, Valve said: “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. More improvements are coming to the build review process, but these initial changes are a great starting point.”
The AI question Valve left out
AI doesn’t come up anywhere in Valve’s post. Developers have been more direct, blaming a wave of AI vibe-coded games that arrive at review without basic pre-release checks.
On X, developer 2 Left Thumbs wrote: “The time seems to have spiked around September/October. Presumably [due in part to]… the overwhelming amount of slop now flooding Steam.”
Reddit user u/ploz put numbers to that timeline. In October, 49.9 percent of games released on Steam disclosed AI-generated content. In June, close to 20 percent of Next Fest game demos disclosed AI use.
Small studios take the hit
For a small studio, slipping two weeks can undo months of marketing work. structmira, the developer of Cubic Earth, said the delay landed right when interest in the game was at its highest.
“Our game’s trailer amassed more than 60,000 views on YouTube, and we had more than 6,000 wishlists,” structmira said. “Now, our Steam Community page is rapidly filling with player complaints, and we’ve lost all momentum.”
Launching on Steam soon? Build in more buffer than seems necessary, and spend those five minutes playing your build through the Steam client before you submit. A build that gets bounced for re-review goes back into the 12-day queue.