Steam's review queue backs up, and Valve's first fix is "play your own game"

Wednesday's AI gaming news is about who gets to make games, now that AI makes it so much easier, and what that does to everyone around them.

There are three stories. First, the stores again: Valve, which runs Steam, says submissions have jumped so much in recent months that reviewing a game build now takes up to 12 business days instead of the usual 3 to 5. Its first fixes are a set of new checks, starting with one that sounds almost too obvious to need saying. Second, the studios: a report out of Korea looks at an industry that is cutting jobs while hiring people with AI skills. And third, something lighter: a group of kids in a regional Australian city who made their first games without writing a line of code.

Here's what happened, in plain English.

Steam's review queue is backed up

If you've been following this show over the past week, you'll know that the stores are where the wave of cheap, fast game-making shows up first. itch.io has been deleting bulk AI uploads, and an analysis of public Steam data found that almost half of October's new Steam releases disclosed AI-generated content. This week it's Steam's turn to talk about the strain, although Valve itself frames it differently.

On Tuesday, Valve posted an update for developers on its Steamworks news page called "Updates to the Pre-Release Review Process". Some background first. Before a game goes on sale on Steam, it goes through a review. Someone at Valve installs the game, plays it, and checks that it matches what its store page promises. It isn't a judgment of whether the game is good. It's a basic quality gate that catches broken builds, missing features and store pages that don't describe the game properly.

Valve says it has seen "a significant increase in submissions" for store page and build review in recent months, and that it has spent the last several weeks scaling up its process to match. It admits it still has a way to go.

The number developers care about is in the post's FAQ. Valve says it aims to test every build within 3 to 5 days, but that right now it is "running a little behind" and taking up to 12 business days. It adds that much of that delay comes from having to re-review games that failed the first time, which, as Valve puts it, isn't great for developers or for Valve. It also says it has heard from a lot of developers and knows how stressful the longer waits have been.

That stress is real for small studios, where a launch date is often tied to marketing, press and a lot of personal planning. Engadget, which wrote up the change, reports that some indie games have missed their launch dates, sometimes by weeks. On Tuesday's episode we covered one of them: Wheel Make It, a co-op game published by Two Left Thumbs, which waited about two weeks for review and missed its planned launch. Engadget quotes the publisher on X saying the wait times "seem to have spiked around September/October."

Valve's new release checklist

So what's Valve doing about it? Its first answer is a longer release checklist, the list of boxes a developer has to tick before submitting a game. The idea is to catch the basic problems before a reviewer ever sees the build, so fewer games fail and come back.

The most notable new item is almost funny. Developers now have to run their game through Steam for at least 5 minutes before submitting it, by pressing the green Play button in the Steam client. In Valve's own words: "Believe it or not, sometimes we review builds that have not ever been played through Steam." A game might run fine when its developer launches the program directly, Valve explains, but still have missed settings that matter when a player installs it through Steam. The playtime can come from anyone on the team, and it has to be recent: within the past 7 days, or since the last build was uploaded.

The other new checks are more technical:

• Add-ons. Many games rely on common software packages, such as DirectX or Visual C++, which Steam can install automatically for players. Developers now have to say which ones their game needs, or confirm it needs none.
• Achievements. Steam now flags incomplete achievement setups, such as missing names or icons, or duplicates.
• Cloud saves. If a game says it supports Steam Cloud, someone on the team now has to actually write a save file to Steam Cloud before review, to prove the save location is set up correctly.
• Reminders. When a developer submits a build, Steam now shows reminders based on what the store page promises. If the page lists several languages, for example, it asks whether they're all in the build.

There's also a change that players will notice on store pages. Screenshots now come in categories, such as gameplay, menus, concept art and in-game cinematics, and the category shows up as a label on the store. Developers can now upload images that aren't gameplay, as long as they're labelled, but every game needs at least 5 screenshots marked as gameplay. In practice, that means a store page can't be made up entirely of pretty concept art.

Valve also shared what its reviewers are looking for, and it boils down to three questions. Is the store page clear and complete? Does the game match what the store page promises? And does the build contain sensitive content that isn't clearly disclosed to players?

Where AI comes in

Valve's post doesn't blame AI for the backlog. Its one mention of AI is in that third question: reviewers compare what's in a game with what the developer disclosed in Steam's content survey, "such as mature content and AI usage." Since 2024, developers on Steam have had to disclose when a game uses AI-generated content.

The press has been more direct. Engadget's headline frames the change as coming "amid a flood of AI games," and its own take is that what Valve left unsaid is that the store has been flooded with AI "vibe-coded" games without adequate pre-release checks. Vibe coding is a term for asking an AI to write most of a program from plain-English requests, often without reading the code closely. Engadget also points to the Reddit analysis we covered on Tuesday, which found that 49.9% of games released on Steam in October disclosed AI-generated content.

It's worth being careful here. Valve hasn't said how many of the extra submissions are made with AI, or how many of the failed reviews involve AI-made games. What it has said is that there are many more submissions, that a lot of them fail on basics, and that more improvements to the review process are coming.

Games jobs are being cut while studios hire for AI skills

Meanwhile, a report from Korea looks at jobs. The Seoul Economic Daily reports that game companies around the world are cutting staff while recruiting new people with AI skills.

The global numbers come from Always Supporting the Games Community (ASGC), a nonprofit that tracks employment in games. According to the paper, ASGC confirmed 10,977 job cuts worldwide between January 1 and October 20 this year. That is already more than its total for all of 2025, which was 9,197, and ASGC estimates the year could end at up to 13,077 if restructuring carries on. About 76% of this year's job losses were in North America. The paper also cites the GDC's 2026 State of the Game Industry report, in which 28% of about 2,300 surveyed game workers said they had been laid off in the past two years.

In Korea, the paper points to a few companies:

• NCSoft, which has used voluntary retirement and spun off development units since 2024. Its chief executive, Park Byung-moo, said head office staff fell from about 5,000 to about 3,100.
• Devsisters, the company behind Cookie Run, which offered voluntary retirement to all employees in May after weak results, froze most hiring, and plans to adopt AI across its operations.

Now the other side of the story. Krafton, the company behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, began its 2027 internship-to-hire program in October and is selecting more than 100 entry-level candidates, its largest intake since it was founded. The program assesses AI skills across six job families, using an assessment tool Krafton built in-house called Cofa-Probe. Nexon, which runs MapleStory and Dungeon & Fighter, dropped its conventional coding test for its own internship-to-hire program in August and introduced AI-based interviews and AI skills assessments instead.

An unnamed industry official told the Korean news agency Newsis that companies are likely to keep cutting existing staff while recruiting new talent with AI skills.

To be fair to the full picture, the paper is clear that the cuts can't be put down to AI alone. It also points to games that failed at launch, rising development costs, and companies rebalancing teams that grew quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic. What the report does show is a shift in what studios are looking for when they do hire: AI skills are becoming part of the entry test.

Kids in regional Australia make games by talking to an AI

And finally, something a bit lighter. ABC News reports on a set of workshops held in October in Bundaberg, a regional city in Queensland, Australia.

About 20 young people aged 8 to 13 took part. They 3D-printed a console, learned how to wire a controller, and brainstormed a game idea. Then, instead of learning to code, they told an AI language model what to build, either by speaking or by typing. A language model is the kind of AI behind chatbots: you describe what you want in plain words, and it can write the code. The kids made racing games, quest games and trivia games.

Thirteen-year-old Bailey Francois explained that you can either speak to it and it converts that into text, or type it out, which Bailey finds a bit harder for long descriptions. Eleven-year-old Alekai Sprague described it as "watching your imagination … come to life in a game."

The idea started at home. One of the organisers, local creative David Quarrell, has a 16-year-old son, Oscar, who can't read or write, but was able to talk to AI. "We've removed the need for reading and writing," Quarrell told the ABC.

His co-organiser, Don Meadows, grew up in Bundaberg and moved overseas to work in game development. "Game design is game design," he told the ABC, arguing that it isn't the same thing as animation or coding. He says there isn't a games industry in Queensland, that people who move overseas tend not to come back, and that he'd love to come back and start one. That's the bigger hope behind the workshops: a game development hub in the region, so young people can work in games without leaving home.

Cody Phillips, a senior lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, told the ABC that Australia punches above its weight in games, but that few titles come out of regional Australia. He called AI a new frontier for opportunities, noting that a lot of people now build games without working in the industry, and said there are "virtually no barriers to somebody publishing their own game." He also said the technology needs stronger safeguards, and that a lot of copyright legislation still needs to be worked out.

The big picture

If there's one thread through today's news, it's that AI is making games easier to make, and everyone around them is adjusting at a different speed.

Steam is the clearest example. Valve's post never says the word "flood," but its numbers tell a story: more submissions than its process was built for, reviews taking more than twice as long as its goal, and a checklist that now has to remind developers to play their own game through Steam before sending it in. The stores are adding friction in the places where low-effort releases tend to fail, and honest small developers are waiting in the same queue.

The studios are adjusting too, in a way that cuts both ways. The Seoul Economic Daily's report shows an industry that has already cut more jobs this year than last, while the biggest Korean companies build AI skills into how they hire. It's not a simple story of AI replacing people, and the paper says so, but it does change what a first job in games looks like.

And then there's Bundaberg, where the same technology that is clogging review queues let a group of kids, including one who can't read or write, make their first games. Whether that turns into a local industry is a long way off. But it's a reminder that "easier to make" isn't only a problem for the stores to solve. For some people, it's the first time making a game has been possible at all.