In a new post today, Valve acknowledged that it has seen “a significant increase in store and page review submissions over the past few months” and says it is “falling behind a bit” by taking “up to 12 business days” for reviews instead of the usual 3-5 days.
Indie developers have recently expressed frustration with long approval times for Steam games, even causing some games to miss planned launch dates. Valve says a “large portion” of the delay is due to re-ratings of games, which is why it’s making some changes to the release checklist for developers to hopefully “reduce re-ratings for basic functional issues.”
The changes include requiring developers to run games through Steam for at least five minutes. “Believe it or not, we sometimes review builds that have never been played through Steam,” Valve explains. “This means that even if a game works fine when a developer launches its executable directly, they may have missed basic steps that would impact a user’s installation and play through Steam.”
Other requirements include making sure the builds are ready and confirming any required common redistributables, like DirectX or Visual C++, that Steam might need to install.
Valve also says that other improvements are in the works for the build review process.
Gn tech
