Steam approvals now take up to 12 days as AI-made games flood the store, so Valve changed the rules

Valve aims to review new Steam releases in three to five days. Right now it's taking up to 12 business days, and indie developers are missing launch dates, some by weeks. So Valve is changing its release rules, Steve Dent reports for Engadget.

The new checklist

Most of the changes target builds that fail review and have to come back for another pass:

• Play it on Steam: developers must run their game through Steam for at least five minutes. Valve says it sees builds that have never been launched through Steam, so a game that works fine from its own executable can still trip on basic steps a real player would hit.
• Confirm the basics: common redistributables such as DirectX and Visual C++, achievements, and Steam Cloud save paths.
• Tag every screenshot by type, for example gameplay, menus or cinematics.

Valve says more improvements to build review are coming.

The part Valve didn't say

Valve's post doesn't mention AI. Developers do. One, 2 Left Thumbs, said on X that review times jumped around September and October, and blamed the flood of slop on the store. A Reddit user tallied October's Steam launches and found 49.9% of them flagged AI-generated content. Back in June, the figure for Next Fest demos was close to 20%.

Read the checklist again with that in mind. "Launch your game at least once through the store you're selling it on" is not a rule you need for experienced teams. It's a rule for people shipping a game they generated faster than they tested.

Who's paying

Mostly human indies who did everything right. The developer behind Cubic Earth told PC Gamer the game had built real momentum, with over 60,000 trailer views and more than 6,000 wishlists, and that the delay let its Steam page fill up with player complaints instead.

It's the same pattern as AI addons swamping World of Warcraft and Nexus Mods' new disclosure rules. When making a game gets cheap, the bottleneck moves to review, and the queue doesn't care who did the work.

If you ship on Steam, the fix is boring: run the checklist before you submit, and give yourself more than five days of buffer before launch. The review queue is the new crunch.

Scoreboard update: AI +1. AI-made games now make up about half of Steam's releases and are setting the pace of its review queue.

Stay undead.