Valve is making changes to deal with a ‘significant increase’ in Steam game submissions

Valve admits that it’s now taking ‘up to 12 business days’ to game submissions.Valve admits that it’s now taking ‘up to 12 business days’ to game submissions.Nov 3, 2026, 10:15 PM UTCImage: Kristen Radtke / The VergeIn a new post today, Valve acknowledged that it’s seen “a significant increase in submissions for store and page review in recent months” and says it’s “running a little behind” by taking “up to 12 business days” for reviews instead of the typical 3-5 days.Indie developers have recently expressed frustrations over lengthy approval times for Steam games, even causing some games to miss planned launch dates. Valve says that “much” of the delay is having to re-review games, so it’s making some changes to the release checklist for developers to hopefully “cut down on re-reviews for basic functional issues.”RelatedThe changes include requiring developers to run games through Steam for at least five minutes. “Believe it or not, sometimes we review builds that have not ever been played through Steam,” Valve says. “This means that 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.”Other requirements include making sure that achievements are ready and confirming any required common redistributables, like DirectX or Visual C++, that Steam may need to install.Valve also says more improvements are in the works for the build review process.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Jay PetersThe Verge DailyA free daily digest of the news that matters most.Email (required)By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. ​