Steam’s Growing Review Backlog Has Cost Another Game Its Launch Date

Steam's growing backlog for approving game builds appears to be getting worse, as yet another studio's game is stuck in the purgatory of the platform's review program. Australia Did It: End-of-the-World Railway Defense Business, a post-apocalyptic game about keeping a cargo railway running after society has collapsed, was originally scheduled to launch on November 10, but it's stuck waiting for Steam's mandatory QA review before it can be published.

"Unfortunately, we're stuck waiting for Steam to review and approve our launch build. We have been waiting for a few weeks now and sadly don't know when they will finally get around to it," Australia Did It publisher Mystic Forge wrote in an update. "We're hoping to be able to launch as soon as possible and will update all of you the second we get an update. We really appreciate all of your continued support and apologize for the situation. We can't wait for you to check out the final game and hope to be able to get it into your hands soon!"

https://youtu.be/pX7HVir6l2o

Australia Did It co-developer and game designer Rami Ismail said the game was originally submitted on October 20, and a minor controller issue caused it to fail. That bug was fixed the same day, but since then, Ismail and Aesthecian Labs have been stuck waiting for Steam approval.

"We've been in the queue again ever since, and have followed up with Valve several times to no result," Rami explained in an email to GameSpot. "The issue was that our in-game feedback functionality does not allow you to send feedback--from a keyboard text input--via controller. I'm used to this kind of hold-and-wait pattern on console, but not really on Steam. 10-14 days pre-launch is usually enough to fail twice over, and usually you only get failed on serious issues."

With reviews for Australia Did It already out, and the game on plenty of wishlists, not having it ready for its scheduled launch isn't doing it any favors. "Pre-emptively delaying the launch would've hurt, as did not doing so," Ismail added. "We decided to take that gamble and trust in Valve's willingness to come through for developers - it seems we bet wrong."

Is a deluge of AI slop to blame for Australia Did It being stuck in QA limbo? Ismail explained that Steam can set its own policies and host "slopware" games on its own servers, but it's also having a negative effect on developers.

"At 30% off of every game sold on the platform, I have to admit I don't really care what the reason is. It's likely slopware is a part of the issue, but the fact that slopware can exist on Steam is their own policy. Whatever the situation, Steam losing the agility and access for developers to launch with minimal friction will mean developers have to treat it more like a console - which means we have to be more careful about launches."

While releasing the game on another platform like the Epic Games Store could be one solution, Ismail noted that the "commercial potential" is much lower than on Steam, which accounts for the lion's share of PC game sales. "With Epic, we're just trading the one billionaire for the other, and the commercial potential is also much lower. For now we're stuck with Steam for commercial game releases."

Ordinarily, every game submitted to Steam undergoes a series of checks to ensure that it'll work on the launcher, a process that used to take a few days. Lately, multiple developers have been complaining that this process now takes up to two weeks, and in some instances, longer, as Steam is reportedly battling to work through a backlog of submitted games. Several studios have blamed a flood of AI slop games, which regularly fail QA and are then resubmitted for review, gumming up the works and creating a bottleneck.

Recently, Valve introduced new measures to help speed up the process, but it's unclear if they've had any real impact. Under the new guidelines, games submitted for QA are required to be run through the Steam launcher for a minimum of five minutes; there will be stricter enforcement on images so that players aren't misled; Steam will run automated checks to flag broken or incomplete achievements; and advertised features will need to be included.