Valve is updating its Steam game release rules to unclog a backlog of approvals that has left games missing their launch dates, sometimes by weeks. The company's target for reviewing new titles is three to five business days, but reviews are currently taking as long as 12 business days.

Valve acknowledged the strain in a community post, writing: "We've heard from a lot of developers and know how stressful it's been having to wait for review build updates longer than expected."

The changes are designed to help more developers pass build review the first time and cut down on re-reviews, which Valve says are driving the longer waits.

IGN reports Valve has seen a significant increase in store page and build review submissions in recent months and has spent several weeks scaling its process to match.

The centerpiece of the new rules is simple but telling: developers must now run their game through the Steam client for at least five minutes before submitting it, to confirm it actually works on the platform.

According to Valve, it has been reviewing builds that were never played through Steam at all — and "even if a game runs smoothly when a dev launches their executable directly, they might have missed basic steps that would impact a user installing and playing via Steam." egamers.io reports developers must also confirm common redistributables like DirectX and Visual C++, verify achievements are ready, confirm Steam Cloud save paths are configured correctly, and tag every store screenshot as gameplay, menus, concept art or cinematics.

Builds that fail now go back to the end of the queue.

Valve never mentions AI in its announcement, but developers have been direct about what they believe caused the pileup.

Developer 2 Left Thumbs wrote on X that "the time seems to have spiked around September/October. Presumably [due in part to]... the overwhelming amount of slop now flooding Steam." egamers.io reports that Reddit user u/ploz confirmed that timeline with data: 49.9 percent of games released on Steam in October disclosed AI-generated content, and in June nearly 20 percent of Next Fest demos disclosed AI use.

The scale of the flood is stark — IGN notes roughly 24,299 games have shipped on Steam this year alone, versus around 4,500 in all of 2016 a decade ago.

For a small studio, slipping even two weeks can undo months of marketing work, and the delays are already biting.

The developer structmira of Cubic Earth told PC Gamer that the timing could not have been worse: "Our game's trailer amassed more than 60,000 views on YouTube, and we had more than 6,000 wishlists. Now, our Steam Community page is rapidly filling with player complaints, and we've lost all momentum."

When a launch window slips after a marketing push, wishlists cool off, community pages fill with complaints, and the momentum a trailer built simply evaporates. egamers.io's advice to developers launching soon: build in more buffer than seems necessary, and spend those five minutes playing your build through the Steam client before submitting.

Valve has not laid out a fix for the AI flood itself. At the Steam Indie Connect event in Korea, the company's business team fielded questions about Steam being flooded with AI slop and knockoff AI clones, and said it is still figuring out how to navigate this new world.

IGN reports Valve has no plans to outright ban AI games, and suggested developers do more to stand out so their games can't be easily cloned.

Steam currently requires developers to disclose AI usage, letting customers vote with their wallets — an approach Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has criticized, calling it a "political message." Indie storefront Itch, meanwhile, recently deleted what it called "terabytes of AI slop" from its store.

GamesRadar+ reports Epic Games online services product director Alexander Rehm called Valve's response to "Steam's AI clone and slop problem" insufficient, arguing that "keep improving forever" advice "is a tax only the well funded can pay" for one- and two-person studios.

Rehm also read Valve's referral of clone extortion reports to law enforcement as "a platform that still sees this as someone else's problem."

Former Valve developer Chet Faliszek fired back on LinkedIn, calling Rehm's take "an absolutely dishonest read" and pointing to Epic's own AI-first pivot, AI-mandatory game jam, and "vibe coded" launcher, while Tim Sweeney has blasted Steam's AI disclosures despite Epic's Fab marketplace mandating them for business customers.

The debate shows no platform has cracked the slop problem yet.