THE CRUNCH
Indie developers are reporting unexpectedly long waits for Steam's build approval process, and some are missing their planned launch dates as a result. Studio Daimon, the team behind Food Devils, submitted its build on October 12th for an early access launch it had planned for today, but the game was still awaiting approval. Game director Alfred Kamon said the studio had sent an urgent ticket warning it might miss its release date, but that it was ignored.
Other studios have hit the same wall. In October, publisher 2 Left Thumbs said it missed the planned launch of Wheel Make It by nearly two weeks, after a review flagged a single menu option that was not accessible with a controller.
Valve's own developer guidance says a store review typically takes three to five business days, and it advises submitting at least seven business days ahead of launch. Current waits of several weeks sit well outside that window.
The suspected cause is volume. October's Steam Next Fest featured 7,240 games, a 65.2 percent increase over June's event, according to How to Market a Game, and nearly half of all games released since Valve began asking developers to label AI use in 2024 now carry an AI disclosure, 49.9 percent by one Reddit user's count. Kamon and 2 Left Thumbs suspect the queue is being clogged by what they call AI slop, though that remains their assumption rather than a confirmed explanation from Valve.
Itch.io is seeing similar pressure, saying last weekend that the number of game pages created per day has doubled in the past two months, and saying last night that it had deleted a couple of terabytes of AI slop.