Valve’s approval course of has at all times taken a little bit of time, but it surely’s taking for much longer these days due to the staggering quantity of video games hoping to launch on the platform — a problem that’s solely grown with the appearance of generative AI.
As of November 2026, roughly 24,299 video games have been launched on Steam this 12 months alone, in comparison with 10 years in the past when round 4,500 video games launched throughout your entire 12 months of 2016.
Except you’re a serious writer with a confirmed monitor file, all video games should endure Valve’s testing course of to verify they’re match for Steam and don’t riddle gamers’ computer systems with malware. However many video games at the moment are lacking their launch dates due to this backlog.
The difficulty has gotten so dangerous that Valve put out an official assertion acknowledging the difficulty. “We have seen a big enhance in submissions for retailer web page and construct overview in current months, and have spent the final a number of weeks working to scale our course of to match it,” Valve mentioned.
“Although we nonetheless have a methods to go, we need to share the preliminary enhancements which have shipped prior to now weeks. The modifications are designed to assist extra builders move construct overview the primary time, and minimize down on re-reviews for primary useful points.”
Often it takes Valve 3-5 enterprise days to overview a sport, however the common is now 12 enterprise days. Among the delay is because of builders not being prepared, video games being rejected or having to be retested. Valve left a sequence of ideas for builders to move approvals the primary time.
“We have heard from loads of builders and understand how irritating it has been having to attend for overview construct updates longer than anticipated,” Valve mentioned. “Extra enhancements are coming to the construct overview course of, however these preliminary modifications are an incredible place to begin.”
Valve didn’t deal with the AI subject within the put up, however the subject has grown to the purpose the place Valve staff are being requested how Steam plans to deal with the difficulty. Valve’s Steam Enterprise Staff took to the stage on the current Steam Indie Connect event in Korea and took questions from an viewers of sport builders. In the course of the chat, the difficulty of Steam being flooded with AI slop and knockoff AI clones got here up, and Valve mentioned it was nonetheless attempting to determine navigate this new world.
On the time, Valve mentioned there are not any plans to outright ban AI video games from Steam, and urged builders do extra to face out so their video games can’t be simply cloned.
Steam presently requires builders to reveal AI utilization, giving prospects the choice to vote with their wallets. Epic Video games boss Tim Sweeney doesn’t like this at all, calling it a “political message.” Indie storefront Itch recently deleted what it called “terabytes of AI slop” from its retailer, which made it troublesome for customers to seek out the issues they have been in search of.
Kirk McKeand is a Contributor on IGN Information. Discover him on Twitter @MckKirk