An influx of new, primarily indie, titles have hit Steam over the past few months, as highlighted by a single week in late August where game releases surpassed 700 for the first time in the platform’s multi decade history. Indie titles make up a large percentage of the games available on Steam, having played a part in the platform’s success since “first opening its doors to third party publishers in 2005.” In the years following, Steam has worked to remove barriers for indie developers and publishers, establishing the Greenlight Program in 2012, and, later, replacing it with Steam Direct in 2017. The Steam Direct system simply requires publishers to pay a one time fee, handle paperwork, and submit their game for review three to five business days before release.
Despite the overall success of this system, Valve, the company behind Steam, has shared via official blog that they are running behind on reviewing these games for publication. The team states that they “aim to test every game build in a timely manner, typically within three to five business days. However, [they are] 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.”
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.
As a result, Valve has provided five major updates, with the intention of expediting this process, reducing the need to screen games twice. First, a prospective game must run for at least five minutes in the Steam interface. This means that the review team will not have to screen games that have never been played in Steam for compatibility issues. The next updated requirement is that applicants must “confirm any required redistributables,” such as “DirectX, Visual C++, .NET, [and] XNA.” If a studio did not use any of these, they must now say so. Two additional policies address game progression and save files. Now, applicants are required to “confirm [their] achievements are ready” and save their game to Steam Cloud. Finally, the application now has room for five different screenshots from gameplay, offering players visual context to the world of the game.
Responses from the Steam community to this news range from concerned to hopeful, depending on approach. One Redditor shares their thoughts on the situation, saying that “the changes are very minor in my opinion. I don’t think it will improve their review time.” As another points out, though, they believe that these are “very reasonable changes. And it saves a lot of wasted time for both sides so that’s absolutely great.” For indie developers like MrStevensStudios whose games’ release dates have been suddenly changed to “coming soon,” this update could provide potential answers.