Steam is derelict of its duty," says ex-Square Enix exec as Valve struggles

Putting a game up on Steam right now comes with some challenges. For a start, AI has made copycats much more rampant, making it even harder to stand out, and that's after you manage to slowly get approved for release thanks to a gigantic game backlog at Valve. In response to the latter, an ex-higher up at Square Enix believes the platform needs to buck up to fulfill its responsibilities.

In a post on Steam, Valve acknowledges current delays around game approvals and says it's working on ways to speed things up. "We're running a little behind right now and taking up to 12 business days," the company says. "Much of that delay is due to having to re-review games, which isn't great for you or for us."

Jacob Navok, former executive at Square Enix, responded to this news on Twitter. "Steam generates 3x the revenue of Roblox while Roblox has up to 1000x more games released per day than Steam," he says. "Yet Roblox games release in seconds via an automated review system and Steam takes weeks."

This definitely isn't a one-to-one comparison. Roblox projects are made in the game platform itself and it has moderation issues of its own. Automation may be efficient, but it's prone to abuse once bad actors understand what's more likely to get dinged. Also: the firehose of slop that is Roblox is not the model Valve wants to emulate, especially as it actively seeks to control its own slop infestation.

Nonetheless, the point stands that Valve could pump more resources into this aspect of the storefront. "The problem is not AI games increasing the number of Steam reviews. This is bullshit being sold to you," Navok continues. "The problem is Steam is derelict of its duty."

Releases leaning on gen AI are exacerbating existing strain on Steam's systems. The amount of games coming out was steadily increasing even before vibe coding accelerated the amount of games and outright slop getting pushed onto the conveyor belts.

That being said, the solution doesn't seem as simple as Navok makes it out to be in a reply: "Moderation is a solvable problem if they invest billions into it."

"Poor Valve, it only generates $20bn a year with 5 people working there," he quips. "The money has to be spent on so many boats they cannot afford to hire a sixth reviewer." Doubling down on the hundreds of millions that Valve cofounder Gabe Newell has spent on yachts, he adds, "Everything for gaben's navy."

More serious is his stance on Valve's resources: "It should invest into proper tooling and humans to do reviews at scale."

This looks to be what Valve is doing, as the company just said it has "spent the last several weeks working to scale our process to match" the spike in games submitted.

Navok points to Roblox's AI-assisted detection systems for mature or problematic content, but - again - the context is fundamentally different because it's one company monitoring assets it has control over, not the same sort of open market. The complexity and variance of the games under review is incomparable.

Navok also notes how much money Valve makes annually compared to the issues it's facing. "Valve takes 30% from you as a developer but has spent nothing to invest into the systems required to handle content reviews. Absolutely shameful," he concludes.

When you have small teams facing ripoffs before their game's even out, it's hard to argue that Steam has a problem. But ripoff capital Roblox isn't a convincing North Star.

Becoming Roblox appears to be the opposite of Valve's plan, so pruning or automating reviews so thoroughly that games are cleared in seconds (read: not actually reviewed) might address the quantity issue, but not the quality one many people on both sides certainly seem to care about.

Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima says he'll be dead by then, but worries AI will eventually "play a key role" in creative fields: "Getting a finished picture is not what’s fun about drawing"