Steam Is Tightening Its Game Submission Rules As AI Slop Floods The Store

Valve currently has a review backlog on Steam, as the mandatory QA check every game must pass before launch on the platform has reportedly seen wait times balloon from a few days to over two weeks. The problem appears to be a massive number of builds, thought to be AI slop, that fail basic technical checks and are sent back for re-reviews, gumming up the works. To make headway and reduce back-and-forth friction, Valve has announced it's tightening the rules on what developers must verify before submitting builds.

According to Valve, developers must ensure their games can run through Steam for at least five minutes, since the platform often receives builds that have never launched through Steam. Developers must also explicitly state whether their game requires common components like DirectX, Visual C++, or.NET so Steam knows to install them automatically, and, if advertised, prove that cloud saves work.

On top of that, Steam will run automated checks to flag broken …