A queue that outgrew its own advice
Valve's documentation says a review typically takes 3-5 days and recommends submitting at least seven business days before launch. According to Kotaku, a Steamworks post published on November 3 now acknowledges "a significant increase in submissions" and says reviews are taking up to 12 business days, partly because games with submission issues get re-reviewed.
Valve adds that it is adjusting internal processes and adding items to the developer release checklist. Kotaku notes the post does not mention generative AI.
Teams stuck in the middle
Kotaku's reporting names several projects caught in the wait. Caravan Carnage: Fruity Road was submitted on October 16 and approved on November 1. Ashen Legacy was submitted on October 15, rejected at first, then approved on November 1, five days before its planned release.
Food Devils, from the nine-person Italian studio Studio Daimon, was submitted on October 12 for a November 3 launch and was still waiting when Kotaku published. Director Alfred Kamon told the outlet that Valve raised a content concern on October 26, which he addressed right away, and that a week later he had no reply. Because Steam pays out with a one-month delay, he said the team needs sales before year-end.
A launch that missed its window
Publisher 2 Left Thumbs blamed the delay for the rough debut of Wheel Make It. PC Guide and GamesRadar report that the game peaked at 15 concurrent players despite 11,000 wishlists. Kotaku adds that it launched about three weeks late after an early rejection over how local co-op could be reached. The publisher has pointed at the volume of AI-generated games, though Valve has not said that is the cause, and the Steamworks post names only submission volume.
Kotaku also cites figures from LaunchRivals and a Reddit analysis: roughly 4,000 games released on Steam in October, nearly half of them disclosing some generative AI use.
What a small team can do with this
You can't control the queue, but you can control what enters it. Rejections and re-reviews are what stretch the wait, and many of them come from things a pre-submission pass would catch: a store page that doesn't match the build, a feature reviewers can't find, a build that fails on a clean install.
Treat Valve's 12 business days as the new planning number and add buffer on top. Run your submission build on a machine that has never seen your dev tools, give reviewers clear instructions for every mode, and keep the date flexible until approval lands.
Want a second pair of eyes on your build before it goes to review? IndieBug can run that clean-install pass for you.