Devs Are Blaming A Flood Of AI Slop On Steam For Delaying Their Games

November is, to put it lightly, nuts for video games. World of Warcraft: Forever launches tomorrow. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time will be out just a few hours after that. And a short two weeks after that, the juggernaut arrives: GTA 6. So as you might imagine, dozens of indie games are trying to get their releases out now, before these heavy hitters show up and suck all the air out of the room, monopolizing the time of content creators and players who might otherwise pay attention to smaller projects. But the folks behind a lot of those indie games are now worried they might be forced to launch right in the middle of that AAA maelstrom, thanks to what they believe to be a major bottleneck going on internally at Valve; one they think is caused by a flood of AI slop games. Throughout October, multiple indies have posted on social media suggesting that their approvals process on Steam was taking longer than usual. Normally, Valve says it expects a 3-5 day waiting period when a developer submits a game for approval to appear on the Steam store. Valve then might get back to the developer with any issues it has, and it’s another few days to review again. Once Valve considers any such issues resolved, the game can then be published on the storefront. For all this, Valve specifically advises developers, “you’ll want to submit your page for review at least 7 business days before you want it live to account for potential changes you’ll need to make.” Except recently, seven business days hasn’t cut it. Throughout October, a number of indie developers have posted on social platforms sharing that their reviews are taking two or three weeks or more to complete for no discernible reason. There’s Caravarn Carnage: Fruity Road, for instance, which finally made it through Steam approvals on November 1 after submitting on October 16: Hi @Steamworks, my games build has been stuck in review since October 16, beyond the usual 3-5 business days. I've contacted support but haven't received an update on the build review. Can I get any help with this? — Gonzossm (@Gonzossm) October 27, 2026 Ashen Legacy submitted on October 15, and was finally approved on November 1, coming in hot ahead of a planned November 6 release date: Oh my god! My first submission was rejected, and I’ve already had to wait over two weeks. The scariest thing right now isn’t the threat of AI-generated game clones—it’s the wait for Steam’s review process. It’s a race to see whose game gets approved first, and with my scheduled… pic.twitter.com/rgbgwK8PVE — Ashen Legacy | Wishlist on Steam (@VerStudiovn) October 31, 2026 Lacey’s Flash Games was recently forced into a delay; it finally came out on Halloween, four days late: And Wheel Make It was forced to launch three weeks late: Wheel Make It has been unintentionally delayed while we're waiting on @Steam's approval. The game was submitted for review 2 weeks ago, and was rejected because they couldn't figure out how to access local co-op (you literally just share a keyboard…) The re-review has been… pic.twitter.com/jLvB6QHZvK — 2 Left Thumbs (@2_left_thumbs) October 12, 2026 Here’s a statement from Mira, one of the developers of the similarly-in-limbo Cubic Earth, provided to Kotaku: We’re a small team, and we’ve spent a long time building up to getting our debut Early Access title, Cubic Earth, out into the world. Having it derailed last minute has been incredibly disheartening. Despite our best effort to follow Valve’s established processes and adherence to their stated timelines, our game now has no known launch window. We’ve received a number of player complaints and questions across the Steam Community and YouTube, wondering why the game did not launch at the stated time. To make matters worse, organic traffic to our store page from Steam features has dropped off completely, and what was shaping up to be a promising Early Access launch now feels more like an anxiety inducing nightmare. We’re hoping that this can be resolved as painlessly as possible, and trying to keep our eyes on the future! Earlier today, I spoke at length to another impacted developer: Alfred Kamon, director of Studio Daimon, which is making Food Devils. Food Devils was supposed to launch today. It won’t be doing that, though, because it’s still awaiting Steam approval after being submitted way back on October 12. Kamon says he first started to wonder if something was wrong about a week after the submission, with Valve still silent. On October 24, he followed Steam’s published advice for what to do if response was too slow: he submitted a support ticket. On the 26th, Valve responded with a concern about sexual content in the game, to which Kamon immediately replied in an attempt to resolve the issue. Now, seven days after that, he’s still waiting for a reply. Valve also responded to his support ticket, essentially telling him to wait for the review team to get back to him. (Kotaku has seen all of these messages between Kamon and Valve). Kamon tells me that from his perspective, Studio Daimon did everything right in order to launch on time. Even with Valve having an issue with content, he says that in the past such problems have only taken 2-3 days to resolve, and he had prepared for that. He had not prepared for three weeks of waiting…and counting. He can’t even provide full game keys to reviewers until approvals are done (beta keys can and have gone out). “Just before the release, everyone is crunching a lot just to finish everything, to do QA, to polish and to prepare all the content,” he said. “So everyone in the team maybe even stayed up late or even during weekends. It was very, very hard. And despite everything, I think it’s sad because everyone made so many sacrifices to be here now today, and we still couldn’t make it.” What’s really ironic is that Food Devils‘ original release date was actually supposed to be November 5, but 24 hours before the team planned to announce it, Ocarina of Time planted its flag that same day. So the team moved it up. “Oh, no, we are not releasing on the same day as Zelda,” Kamon said. Of course, now there’s a solid chance they might. I asked Kamon if it made sense to hold the game even longer, maybe into early December. After all, following Ocarina of Time is GTA 6. It’s a terrible month to release a small indie game, and Food Devils was originally getting in just barely under the wire. But Kamon tells me that’s not an option. Studio Daimon is a small studio: just nine people, based in Italy, working on Food Devils for the last four years. It’s made one other game before, Path of the Midnight Sun, and it’s not exactly rolling in cash. Kamon tells me that the studio really needs the money from sales of Food Devils before the end of the year, and Steam pays out on a one-month delay. If Food Devils can’t launch soon, the studio might be in trouble financially. Why is all this happening? No one knows for sure. Valve hasn’t said. We reached out to the company for comment, and were told a blog post is coming sometime later today, but we were not briefed on its contents and aren’t sure when it will drop; we’ll update when it does. Impacted developers have a theory about what’s happening, though: they think it’s an AI slop problem. As of mid-October, more games have been released on Steam in 2026 than in all of 2025, with two and a half months to go. And in October alone, around 4,000 games were released on the platform, with nearly 50 percent of them disclosing some use of generative AI in development. That’s a lot of games coming through very, very fast, the speed aided by the ability of generative AI to churn out game-shaped things quickly. Developers suspect that, given these numbers, Valve is struggling to keep up with the sudden influx of submissions, and smaller studios without the clout to ask Valve to expedite their games are suffering for it. But without word from Valve, no one can prove that’s what’s really happening. The thing is, Valve has acknowledged that the platform has some issue with AI slop. It finally made a statement last week, after over 8,000 demos flooded Steam Next Fest last month, alongside a report that a developer was extorted by someone threatening to make an AI clone of their project, as well as several developers admitting publicly that they hesitated to release game demos for fear of having their games cloned. But that statement was just that people at Valve didn’t want to be “gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use.” Valve’s Marc Wilkinson also said, “We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem.” But as much as one might appreciate how difficult it may be to figure out how to regulate AI, at the moment, a number of developers are actively suffering with no clear path to relief. At this point, all Kamon wants is for Food Devils to be approved as soon as possible. He did say it would be nice to get some increased visibility on Steam to make up for this situation, since his release plans have now been all messed up through no fault of his own. And he wishes Valve would be transparent about how long the review process will take. “I can also sympathize with those who have to review all these games,” he says. “But as a dev, at least I would like some honesty in the UI when you submit a game. Tell us it may take weeks. Just don’t promise us three to five days because then we make plans around the release date. We create hype. We announce everything. People are happy that the game is releasing and in the end, it doesn’t.”