Steam Wants Devs to Play Their Games For At Least 5 Minutes First
Valve now requires developers to launch their game through the Steam client and run it for at least five minutes before submitting it for review, as…
Why am I seeing this Ranked on recency
It is here mostly because it is new. Freshness is the largest single contributor to its score, which means nothing about the story except that it is recent.
Nothing much is corroborating this yet. On a quiet day in gaming that is enough to reach the top of the section — recency, not significance, is doing the work here.
Link-outLink-out, because only one organisation carries it and no first-party source is on it. Link-out means we point at the publisher and say nothing of our own.
| Factor | Weight | Score | Contribution | Where it came from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corroboration | 0.35 | 0.39 | +0.135 31% | 1 independent org on the story. Tier-3 aggregators never corroborate — they can show something is circulating, never that it is true. |
| Source trust | 0.25 | 0.44 | +0.110 25% | TechPowerUp is the highest-trust source on this story. Trust is taken from the best source, not averaged. |
| Pickup rate | 0.20 | 0.00 | +0.000 0% | One counted organisation, so there is no spread to measure — nothing has picked this up to set a rate. |
| Freshnessleads | 0.20 | 0.98 | +0.196 44% | Halves every 10 hours from the newest item on the story. This is the only factor that rewards a story for nothing more than being recent. |
Corroboration counts distinct organisations, once each, and only from tiers 1 and 2. Freshness halves every 10 hours, so this ranking is a snapshot and will differ at the next build.
What happened
Valve now requires developers to launch their game through the Steam client and run it for at least five minutes before submitting it for review, as part of several new additions to Steam's pre-release checklist. It doesn't have to be the developer playing, since anyone's playtime counts, as long as it was logged within the past seven days, or since the last build upload if that's older. Apparently, Valve keeps getting builds that were never run through Steam at all, which is how games end up with broken launch options or missing depots. The changes are meant to cut down Steam's review backlog. Valve says store page and build submissions have jumped over the last few months, and it's quite obvious why that would be.
How this story arrived
Ordered by when each source was first observed, which is what the velocity figure is computed from. Publishers backdate; observed order does not.
- 01 Techpowerup first seen Steam Wants Devs to Play Their Games For At Least 5 Minutes First
Overclock clusters coverage from independent sources and grades it automatically. The figures above are computed, not editorial. This page summarises and links to reporting by the outlets named — follow the links for the original work.