Steam game approvals now take up to 12 business days, and developers blame AI slop

Steam’s reviewers now need up to twelve working days to clear a new game for release, against the three to five that Valve aims for, and the company has started making developers prove they have played their own game through Steam before anyone at Valve looks at it. Valve blames a surge in submissions. The indie studios waiting in that queue have a blunter explanation: a flood of games made with generative AI.

Steam is not alone. Nexus Mods, one of the largest libraries of fan-made mods for PC games, has made AI disclosure mandatory for new uploads, and itch.io, the storefront where many small developers start out, has added a filter that hides AI-made projects. For players, that means more labels and, on some sites, a button to skip AI work entirely. For developers who make games by hand, it means waiting longer to sell them, because a review queue does not care how a game was made.

Valve’s new release checklist, set out in an announcement to Steamworks developers, targets broken builds rather than AI. Developers must now run the game through Steam for at least 5 minutes before submitting it, because, in Valve’s words, “sometimes we review builds that have not ever been played through Steam.” The checklist also asks studios to confirm which system libraries, such as DirectX or Visual C++, Steam should install, flags incomplete achievements, requires a test save to reach Steam Cloud when a game advertises cloud saves, and demands at least five screenshots labelled as gameplay. Valve says much of the backlog comes from re-reviewing games that failed these basics the first time.

The delays are already costing launches. Studio Daimon had planned to release Food Devils in early access on the day The Verge reported that it was still awaiting approval, weeks after the build went in. Its game director, Alfred Kamon, put it bluntly: “We can only assume it’s because Steam’s review queue is clogged up by AI slop.” Publisher 2 Left Thumbs said it missed the launch of Wheel Make It by nearly two weeks. The developer of Cubic Earth told PC Gamer that its trailer had passed 60,000 views and 6,000 wishlists, and that the game’s Steam community page was now “rapidly filling with player complaints.”

The numbers behind the complaint are unofficial but large. The October edition of Steam Next Fest, Valve’s showcase of free demos, carried 7,240 games, 65.2 percent more than the June edition, according to the industry newsletter How to Market a Game, as cited by The Verge. A tally by a Reddit user, cited by Engadget, found that nearly half of the games released on Steam in October carried a generative AI disclosure. Valve has published no figures of its own, and its announcement mentions AI only once, to say that reviewers compare each game with the AI-usage answers in its content survey.

Itch.io has taken the most visible step. Its new “No AI” option sits in the browse menu and in search, and when Engadget switched it on, the number of games shown fell from more than 1.77 million to under 425,000. The platform says the number of game pages created each day has doubled in two months, and it told followers on Bluesky that it had “just deleted a couple terabytes of ai slop.” Its rules already treat excessive AI-generated uploads as spam.

Nexus Mods chose labels over a ban. Site owner Victor “Foledinho” Folmann wrote that the site is “pro-human creativity” but will not prohibit AI-generated mods, because “an outright ban will not eliminate AI from the modding process but will prevent people from mentioning its use.” Every new upload must now carry one of three labels, AI-Generated, AI Media or AI Assisted, and mods in the last group must list the tools used and exactly what they produced. Players get switches to hide AI content on game pages and the homepage, with search next. Nexus also says it will not use mods to train AI or license them to anyone who does, and a new permission setting bars AI training on every hosted file, old ones included, unless the author agrees.

All three systems run on trust. Steam, itch.io and Nexus Mods depend on creators declaring their own AI use, and none has a tool that detects an undisclosed AI asset; Nexus relies on player reports. Engadget did not say how many of the projects hidden by itch.io’s filter actually use AI, because the filter depends on how creators have labelled their pages. Steam, by far the largest of the three platforms, still gives players no AI filter at all. And Valve’s checklist is built to catch games that fail to launch or save, a test that a game assembled with AI can pass as easily as any other.

Valve published the changes on November 3 and says more improvements to build review are coming, along with a reference guide to the new checklist. The Nexus Mods grace period for its new labels and permission settings began the same day and ends on January 2, 2027, after which non-compliant mods go to its Trust and Safety team. All three platforms apply the rules worldwide, so players in every market see the same labels. Until Steam adds a filter of its own, the only way to know whether a Steam game used AI is to scroll down its store page and read what the developer chose to disclose.

Tags: indie games, Generative AI, Steam, video games, Valve, itch.io