Up to 12 business days
Valve normally promises a Steam build review in three to five days. Right now it’s telling developers to expect up to 12 business days, and it has started making them prove they’ve actually played their own game through Steam before they can ask.
The admission came in a Steamworks announcement, “Updates to the Pre-Release Review Process”, posted on 3 November (21:46 UTC). Valve says it has seen “a significant increase in submissions for store page and build review in recent months”, and that “we’re running a little behind right now and taking up to 12 business days.” It gives no figures for how many submissions that means, and we won’t guess.
The wait is also longer than Valve’s standing guidance. Its Steamworks documentation says a build review “typically takes 3-5 business days to complete”, but asks developers to “plan for at least 7 business days”. As of 4 November that page hadn’t been updated to match. The Verge, which also covered the post, reports that indie developers have recently complained about long approval times, with some games missing planned launch dates.
Five boxes to tick before asking
Valve says much of the delay is down to re-reviewing games, and the new checklist items are meant to “cut down on re-reviews for basic functional issues.” Its own example is blunt: “Believe it or not, sometimes we review builds that have not ever been played through Steam.” Here is what developers now have to do, in Valve’s terms:
- Play it through Steam. Launch the game with the green “Play” button for at least 5 minutes. Any user’s playtime counts, and it must fall within the past 7 days, or since the last build if that was uploaded longer than 7 days ago.
- Confirm common redistributables. Specify which ones Steam should install (DirectX, Visual C++, .NET and XNA are Valve’s examples), or indicate the game needs none.
- Get achievements ready. New checks call out incomplete configuration, such as missing names, icons or duplicate names.
- Write a Steam Cloud save. When Steam Cloud is indicated as supported, a member of the partner group must write a save file to it. Valve will also flag cloud sync still in developer mode.
- Add five gameplay screenshots. At least five must be categorised as gameplay.
The screenshot change is the one players will see. Valve says developers could previously upload only screenshots showing gameplay. Now they can also add images of menus, concept art or in-game cinematics, provided they categorise them correctly, and those categories will show as labels on the store page. Valve’s review documentation still tells developers that screenshots “must only contain gameplay”, so that page looks due a rewrite too.
A checklist isn’t a shorter queue
We think this is the right instinct. A human reviewer shouldn’t be spending days on a build that nobody has ever launched through Steam, and a checklist that catches unset redistributables and misconfigured cloud saves is cheap compared with a re-review. It also fits a company that has already been telling developers, as in Valve’s Next Fest admission, that quality on the store is something it is watching.
But Valve doesn’t claim this clears the backlog. It says “we still have a ways to go”, that “more improvements are coming”, and that a reference guide to the release checklist is “coming soon”. Until the 12-day figure drops back toward three to five, developers are the ones absorbing the delay, and we’d treat any launch date that depends on a Steam review as softer than usual.
