Valve's Steam Review Queue Slips Past Three Weeks As Releases Pile Up
Steam's pre-release review process now takes up to 12 business days, Valve says, up from the usual 3 to 5, and some games have waited more than three weeks after resubmitting.
1 source 4h ago
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
Why it matters
Valve is widening the gap between a finished game and a store page it can sell, so a missed review window now costs developers the release date and the store exposure that came with it.
Key Facts
- Valve says Steam's pre-release review, normally 3 to 5 business days, now takes up to 12 business days.
- Valve published a new pre-review checklist on November 4 requiring at least five minutes of playtime through Steam before sale.
- Australia Did It: End-of-the-World Railway Defense Business was submitted for review on October 20 and fixed a controller bug the same day.
- The game's store page had been set for a November 10 release and still displays Coming Soon.
- Developer Rami Ismail said contacting Valve has produced no progress.
Valve published a new checklist on November 4 that requires at least five minutes of playtime before sale. The Australian studio behind Australia Did It: End-of-the-World Railway Defense Business missed its November 10 release date while its build sat in review.
The bottleneck is not the store page but the build check itself, which Valve attributes to a sharp rise in submissions and frequent re-reviews of games already sent in. Valve's November 4 checklist asks developers to confirm they have launched the build through Steam for at least five minutes and to verify redistributables such as DirectX and Visual C++ before submitting.
For developers, the cost is concrete. Australia Did It: End-of-the-World Railway Defense Business went in on October 20, failed on a controller bug, was fixed the same day and resubmitted, and still shows "Coming Soon" on a page that had been set for November 10. Developer Rami Ismail said contacting Valve has produced no progress.
Written with AI by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited. See our editorial policy.
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