Developers waiting on Valve to sign off a game build before launch now have an official figure for how slow things have become. In a Steamworks post published late on 3 November, Valve admitted its pre-release build checks are currently taking as long as 12 business days, well beyond the three to five days it normally targets.
In the FAQ attached to the announcement, Valve wrote that it is “running a little behind right now” and that “Much of that delay is due to having to re-review games, which isn’t great for you or for us.”
Why the queue has grown
Every game must pass a build review before it can go on sale on Steam. Valve’s testers install and play it to check it matches the store page. When a build fails, the developer fixes the problem and resubmits, and that second pass takes up a slot in the same queue as everyone else.
Valve says submissions for both store pages and builds have risen sharply in recent months and that it has spent several weeks trying to scale its process to cope. It admits the waits have been stressful. As VGC reports, some indie developers have been complaining on social media that the delays are pushing back their planned release dates.
Valve’s own announcement does not blame any particular type of game for the surge. It comes a week after Valve said it would not act as a gatekeeper on Steam despite a growing number of AI-generated and cloned releases, so the volume of new submissions is unlikely to drop on its own.
New boxes to tick before submitting
Alongside the admission, Valve is trying to cut the number of games that fail first time for basic reasons. The Steamworks release checklist now includes several new requirements:
- The game must have been launched with the Play button in Steam and run for at least five minutes, within the past seven days or since the latest build was uploaded.
- Developers have to state which common redistributables, such as DirectX, Visual C++ or .NET, Steam should install, or confirm that none are needed.
- Achievements are now checked for missing names, icons and duplicates.
- If a game advertises Steam Cloud support, someone in the developer’s partner group must have written a save file to the cloud first.
- At least five screenshots must be tagged as gameplay, now that menus, concept art and cinematics can be uploaded under their own labels.
The playtime rule is the most telling. Valve says it has reviewed builds that had never once been run through Steam, meaning launch options or content depots could be wrong even when the executable works fine on the developer’s machine.
The submission form will also remind studios about features their store page promises, such as extra languages, and offers a field for test account details on multiplayer games.
What it means for upcoming releases
Valve’s review documentation already tells developers to allow at least seven business days for a build check, so anyone with a launch date close to the holidays now has even less room for a failed first attempt. Valve says more changes to the process are on the way and that the checklist additions are “a great starting point”.
For developers, the advice from Valve is simple: make sure the store page, the build and the content survey all describe the same game, and test it through Steam before pressing submit. Community projects heading to Steam, such as the Dark Messiah Community Edition, go through the same process.
