Many indie game developers have recently posted on social media about surprisingly long wait times for their game submissions to be approved on Steam, with some approvals forcing developers to miss their planned launch dates.
For example, Studio Daimon, the team behind an upcoming title called Food Devilshad planned to launch the game in early access today after submitting its version on October 12. But the game “is still awaiting approval,” according to a message from game director Alfred Kamon. “Even now, we don’t know when Steam will give us the final OK to finally release our game. We sent another ticket last week saying that the situation was urgent and that we might miss our release date because of it, but it was also ignored.”
In October, publisher 2 Left Thumbs said it missed the planned launch of Wheel, do it “nearly two weeks” due to the long wait for build reviews. You can read some details about the studio’s setbacks, including a failed review for a “only one option in the menu” not being accessible with a controller, in a Steam article. There are also many other recent articles on review creation expectations.
Valve states on a Steam developer website that a review of a game’s presence in the store “typically takes 3-5 business days,” although the company suggests submitting a page for review “at least 7 business days before you go live to account for potential changes you’ll need to make.”
However, lately Steam seems to be struggling with a large increase in the number of games; October’s Steam Next Fest had 7,240 games, a 65.2% increase over June’s Steam Next Fest, according to How to market a game. A Reddit user also discovered that 49.9% of all games released since Valve started asking developers in 2024 to label games that use AI now have an AI disclosure.
Kamon and 2 Left Thumbs suspect that the longer waits are due to a “slope” that slows the process. “We can only assume it’s because Steam’s review queue is clogged with AI errors, but the whole process is now taking several weeks for some developers,” Kamon said.
In a new article from Valve published after this article was first published, the company acknowledged that after “a significant increase in store and page review submissions over the past few months,” it is “running a bit behind schedule at the moment” and taking “up to 12 business days” for reviews, saying a large part of the delay is “having to re-review games.” It updated its publishing checklist for developers, including requiring them to run a game through Steam for at least five minutes. Valve also says that other improvements are in the works for the build review process.
Itch.io has also faced an increase in the number of games, with the platform saying last weekend that “the number of game pages created per day has doubled over the last 2 months.” Last night, the platform said: “I just deleted a few terabytes of ai slop 😌”
November 3 update: Added a new message from Valve.
Gn tech
