Indie games may reach Steam later than their announced dates. Valve says its approval queue for new games is now taking up to 12 business days, against the three to five it still lists as normal.
To shorten the wait, Valve has changed the checklist every developer must finish before a new game goes to review. The company blames the delay mostly on re-reviews: a build that fails once goes back into the queue and waits all over again.
The headline rule is five minutes of play through the Steam client. In a Steamworks post dated 3 November, Valve admitted that it sometimes receives builds nobody has ever launched through Steam. Such a game can run perfectly from its own executable and still fail for players, because Steam’s launch options or content depots were set up wrongly. Any account can log the time, but it has to be recent, within the last seven days; if the latest upload is older than that, the count starts again.
The rest of the checklist is smaller. Developers must list the runtime libraries the game depends on (DirectX, Visual C++ and the like) or say it needs none. Achievements get flagged when they lack a name or icon, or reuse a name. A game that advertises cloud saves has to write one to Steam Cloud as proof. Store screenshots are now labelled by type, such as gameplay, menus, concept art or cinematics, though five must still be gameplay shots.
Submission also brings prompts tied to the store page. A game listing several languages is asked to confirm they ship in the build, and a multiplayer game that reviewers cannot test without special accounts gets a place to hand over logins. Valve calls all of this “a great starting point” and promises further changes, but it has not said when reviews will return to the usual three to five days.
The backlog arrives as AI-made games crowd the store. Engadget cites a Reddit user who counted that 49.9% of October’s new Steam releases disclosed AI-generated content, and a developer who said the slowdown began around September and October. Valve’s post does not blame AI.
For developers the cost is concrete. A rejected build means a fix and then up to another 12 business days in the queue, which can delay a launch by almost a month. Valve suggests leaving at least seven business days for fixes, and says it is turning the checklist into a written guide that is still marked as coming soon.
