Meanwhile we were so afraid to hit submit we tested for months even if we were just launching a playtest build. Sweating before every early build submission and our steam review.

Even if it was actually a rubber stamp im glad we took so much care and am glad steam is setting up more tests like this.

Edit: i would like to add our reviewers were super kind. Our unreal build had some obscure issue and they fixed it for us, pushed it for us, and showed us clearly what it was so we understood. But. Dayem. Thats good service and support ngl.

Reminds me of the new Simon the Sorcerer game. The Linux build used a script to launch the actual game. The only thing the script did was to call the game's binary. Trouble was that they misspelled the binary. Just launching it once would have shown them the error.

Ngl, kind of surprised that something like this wasnt the case already.

Four months or so Blizzard dropped a new season for Diablo 4 (along with a new game update), while being "Steam Deck Verified" and the new version of the game didn't launch at all on Linux anymore.

The Proton team had to make an experimental Proton build which took around a day before it was fixed iirc.

So really, even AAA devs can't seem to test launching their games for all scenarios.

We are now living in time where the platform holder asks the developers to at least play their game for 5 minutes. The quality bar is that low.

Same reason Mario maker required completion before sharing the level you made.

Everyone assumes it's just to stop the slop, but I had the same issue with gta4. Could not get past its launcher.

Allegedly, Miyazaki is required to beat every game of From Software (Dark Souls, Sekiro, Elden Eing, etc.) before it can be released.

(There are occasionally glitches that allow you to bypass bosses. For this reason, they are called "Miyazaki's passways".)

5 minutes is paltry. Devs should be required to submit an uncut recording of the first 30 minutes of gameplay from launching via Steam before they can release a game or push an update.

I don't think that's an unreasonable demand, cause if a game can't launch or survive 30 minutes of normal gameplay, it shouldn't be on the store for people to waste their time and/or money on.

heroes3 remake on Steam, few months ago :D

Do it like submitting a mario maker level. If you haven't beat it yourself, no upload for you.

What the actual fuck

The last time I hit submit I had three thousand hours clocked on the game

Honestly surprised this wasn't already a rule. The number of times I've bought something on day one and the first thing I see is a launcher error or a missing DLL is kind of absurd for a store that takes 30%.

The Steam Deck Verified stuff makes it worse, because people trust that badge. If a patch breaks the game on Deck and the badge stays up for weeks, that's on Valve too, not just the dev. Five minutes of a human launching the actual depot would catch most of the dumb ones: wrong launch option, wrong exe, Linux script pointing at nothing.

Considering in the past, even before AI, there have been games put in the store without an executable file, this rule makes sense and should've existed long ago.

Can it verify that the player did more than just sit at the main menu? actually started the game?

Also, hopefully this will cut down on long unskippable opening cutscenes.

Valve should require video of a full game launch through Steam, through the main menu and then starting a new game, with at least five minutes of actual gameplay to verify that it's not a crashy mess.

Also also, it should be required for every major update, not just the initial product listing, along with a list of test platform specs.

Ah yeah? make them 100% the game first

5 MINUTES!? How about 5 months!? I mean WTF!?

Games with launchers becoming trendy in 1, 2, 3...

That's a nice way to leverage Steam's own stats against dumbasses.

Lol.

Can't say how many times I've screamed "DID THE DEVS EVEN PLAY THIS" while smashing my keyboard.

Honestly, it seems like a lot of devs just get caught up in the coding aspect and forget about gameplay.

Those are rookie numbers. I have thousands is hours in my steam game.

They should have to play, actively, to at least 2x the refund window and to record all of this and submit it along with.

I have somehow seen youtube channels of indie devs crashing out over how these are onerous requirements that they will never financially recover from and this means Valve hates indie devs.

While also complaining that their games/updates are taking too long to get actually screened and published.

I have since concluded that those indie devs are hacks, because none of this seems to be unreasonable in anyway.

As 9point6 says... yeah, most of this can pretty easily be handled by adding another step or to to your build automation process, or just, gasp! Do it manually!

Is... is it really that hard to know what your own games dependencies... actually are?

Genuienly ridiculous that Valve has to specifically mandate that uploaded games, you know, need to actually run, don't crash on launch... the bar is apparently in hell.

smdh

"It works on my machine"itis has hit the indie crowd!!

I was about to say this just saved some test engineers' jobs

But then realised it's an easily written post-deploy test automation stage stuck onto the end of the release pipeline

The onions voting simulator wasn't that bad, come on.

What’s a depot in this context?

Great!

They should charge a deposit for reviews. If it's clearly slop, then the deposit is forfeited. A review is cheap enough that even small-time studios should be able to afford this.

I read the headline and was like they want devs to play Half-life?

I would trust my pipelines that much