Valve is reworking how it approves new games for Steam, and the company is upfront that it is behind. In a Steamworks Development post published November 3, Valve said it has seen “a significant increase in submissions for store page and build review in recent months,” and that reviews are now taking up to 12 business days, more than double the three to five days it still lists as its normal window.
“We’re running a little behind right now and taking up to 12 business days,” Valve wrote in the post’s FAQ. “Much of that delay is due to having to re-review games, which isn’t great for you or for us.”
A checklist aimed at first-pass approvals
The changes apply to the pre-release review every new game passes before launch, covering both the store page and the playable build.
The update is a set of requirements meant to keep builds out of the re-review loop. One of them requires at least five minutes of Steam playtime before a developer can submit a build for review.
“Believe it or not, sometimes we review builds that have not ever been played through Steam,” Valve wrote. A game can run cleanly when a developer launches the executable directly and still break for a player installing and launching it through the Steam client, which is exactly the path a reviewer checks. Valve spells out how the requirement works: the playtime can come from any account, it must land within the past seven days, and if the last build was uploaded more than seven days ago, the clock resets to that build. There is a delay of a couple of minutes between exiting the game and the playtime showing on the checklist.
The requirement confirms that launch options are configured correctly and that the necessary content depots are included. A build that launches from the raw executable can be missing both, and neither problem shows up until someone presses Play in Steam.
The same update adds several quieter checks. Developers have to name the common redistributables their game depends on, such as DirectX, Visual C++, .NET, or XNA, or state plainly that none are required. Steam installs these dependencies automatically when a game declares them, and some engines will not run without them. The checklist now flags achievement setups with missing names, missing icons, or duplicate names. For games that advertise Steam Cloud support, a member of the developer’s partner group has to write a save file to the cloud to prove the save path is configured, and Valve warns when developer mode is still enabled on cloud sync.
The screenshot rules changed too. Where developers could previously upload only gameplay screenshots, they can now add menu shots, concept art, and in-game cinematics as long as each image is tagged with a category, and those labels will show on the store page. At least five screenshots still have to be marked as gameplay, and Valve repeated that screenshots cannot be used as marketing copy.
Valve also added dynamic reminders at the moment of submission, keyed to what a game’s store page advertises. If a store page lists multiple languages, Valve asks the developer to confirm those languages are in the build. If a game has multiplayer but reviewers need special accounts to test it, there is a field to hand over credentials. The reminders keep a reviewer from hitting a wall that a developer could have cleared in advance.
Why the backlog built up
Valve describes the delay as a volume problem it has been scaling toward for weeks. The company said it has spent “the last several weeks working to scale our process to match” the jump in submissions, and it pins the bottleneck on re-reviews. Every build that fails once returns to the queue for a second pass. That second pass is what pushes wait times from three to five days toward 12.
The submission spike hits a storefront that keeps adding games. Sandbox games took the largest share of earnings in a 98,555-title study, and each new game means another store page and build flowing through the same review team. Valve describes the queue as overloaded, and the checklist is its first move.
What the changes mean for developers and players
A developer who fails review once faces the time to fix the issue, then a second review that can itself take up to 12 business days. At the outer edge, a single rejection stretches a launch by close to a month.
Valve’s own guidance recommends allowing at least seven business days for corrections, and the 12-business-day reality sits well above that.
Valve’s review team installs and plays every submitted build. In its FAQ, Valve lays out the three questions those reviewers ask: is the store page clear and complete, does the build match what the store page promises, and is any sensitive content, including mature content and AI usage, disclosed in the content survey. A developer who runs that checklist before submitting is far less likely to see the build bounce back.
Valve has not said when review times will return to three to five days. It describes the new requirements as “a great starting point” and promises more changes to the build review process, which means the longer window is the baseline for the near term. Valve is also turning its release checklist documentation into a written reference guide, though it is still marked as coming soon. The company has been tightening other parts of Steam’s processes this year, including age checks that gate mature content in Australia.
For players, small and mid-sized games may slip their announced launch dates while their builds wait in the queue.
