Pre-release build reviews on Steam are taking up to 12 business days rather than the usual three to five, Valve said in a Steamworks post, Updates to the Pre-Release Review Process, published on 3 November 2026. The post sets out new items developers must complete on the release checklist before a build reaches the review team.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in submissions for store page and build review in recent months, and have spent the last several weeks working to scale our process to match it,” Valve wrote. In the post’s FAQ, the company said: “We aim to test every game build in a timely manner, typically within 3-5 business days. However, we’re running a little behind right now and taking up to 12 business days. Much of that delay is due to having to re-review games.”
Every submission goes through checks on the store page and on the build itself before a game can be published. A build still in review cannot go on sale on its planned date, whether that date was set around an event such as October’s Steam Next Fest or chosen by the studio on its own.
Australia Did It missed 10 November and now ships on 17 November
Australia Did It: End-of-the-World Railway Defense Business, made by Rami Ismail and Aesthetician Labs and published by Mystic Forge, was set for 10 November. The studio announced the date in October alongside the game’s final title, which players had voted on, telling them “Your New Career Starts November 10!” The date passed with the launch build still in review.
Ismail said in an email to GameSpot that the build was submitted on 20 October and failed over a minor controller problem: in-game feedback could not be sent from a keyboard text input using a controller. The team fixed it the same day. “We’ve been in the queue again ever since, and have followed up with Valve several times to no result,” he said. The studio decided against delaying the launch pre-emptively. “We decided to take that gamble and trust in Valve’s willingness to come through for developers – it seems we bet wrong,” Ismail said.
On 14 November the publisher posted an update headed “We’re So Back!!!!” saying the build had cleared. “Build approved, and train track cleared,” Mystic Forge wrote, adding that “Australia Did It: End-of-the-World Railway Defense Business is releasing on the 17th of November!” The Steam store listing still carried a release date field reading “Coming soon” on 14 November, so the game could not yet be bought or given as a gift on Steam.
What Valve changed in the release checklist
The changes are aimed at helping more developers pass review the first time. The most prominent addition requires developers to launch the game from Steam and play it for at least five minutes before submitting. “Believe it or not, sometimes we review builds that have not ever been played through Steam,” Valve wrote, saying a build that runs fine from a developer’s own executable can still be missing steps that affect a player installing through the client. Playtime from any user counts, and it must fall within the past seven days, or since the last build if that was uploaded longer ago.
Other new items cover common redistributables such as DirectX, Visual C++, .NET and XNA, which developers must now either specify or declare unnecessary; checks that call out incomplete achievement configuration, including missing names, missing icons and duplicate names; and Steam Cloud save detection, which requires a save file to be written to the cloud by a member of the partner group when cloud saves are listed as a feature. Store pages now need five screenshots categorized as gameplay, with separate categories for menus, concept art and in-game cinematics.
Valve has also added reminders at the point of build submission that change with the features a store page advertises, such as asking developers to confirm that promised language options are in the build, or to supply credentials for multiplayer that reviewers cannot otherwise reach. The company said more improvements to the build review process are coming and that it will keep adding to its documentation on release checklists.
Where the AI claims come from
Two studios have publicly linked the backlog to low-quality submissions. Alfred Kamon, game director at Studio Daimon, whose Food Devils was submitted on 12 October and missed its planned early access launch, said: “We can only assume it’s because Steam’s review queue is clogged up by AI slop.” The publisher 2 Left Thumbs said its game Wheel Make It missed its planned launch “by nearly two weeks” because of build review waits. Both sets of comments were published by The Verge. Valve’s post does not cite AI as a cause of the backlog; it mentions AI only as a content-survey disclosure check, and gives no cause beyond the rise in submissions and the volume of re-reviews.
Ismail did not make the same accusation. He said Steam sets its own rules on what it hosts: “It’s likely slopware is a part of the issue, but the fact that slopware can exist on Steam is their own policy.” At a 30 percent cut of every game sold on the platform, he said, he did not really care what the reason is. He added that if Steam loses “the agility and access for developers to launch with minimal friction”, developers will have to treat it more like a console and be more careful about launches.
Releasing elsewhere is not a straightforward fix, Ismail said. With the Epic Games Store, “we’re just trading the one billionaire for the other, and the commercial potential is also much lower. For now we’re stuck with Steam for commercial game releases.”