Valve has now made it mandatory for developers to contact the company before they have any release date changes on Steam for their games. Previously, developers could freely change the release date information by editing any changes required. However, the company now wants developers to ask for permission prior to any changes.
The change comes after many developers changed the release date from their backend so that their game titles appear in the Steam’s Popular Upcoming Releases list while pushing other games down. The issue was confirmed back in March by Valve employees about the exploit, and not it seems Valve has worked around it with this solution.
According to PCGamesN, a Reddit user HeadlessIvan, who says they work with indie publishing, got a message when updating the release dates of one of the games.
If you need to make changes to this date, please contact Valve here with the reason for your new release date and what date you like it set as. You should be pretty certain that your new date is the date you will release.
Valve has confirmed the new policy and that they would be sending reminders to developers two weeks before the planned release of their games, in order to confirm if the release dates are accurate.
This new system will definitely put an end to the release date abuse, even though it creates an extra hurdle for the developers to work out on the game pages on Steam. Any changes they plan will now have to go through with Valve, as opposed to simply editing the dates. Even HeadlessIvan who posted the original story on Reddit agrees to the change by titling the post heading as “Finally the end of Release Date abuse in Steam.” So it is safe to say that other small indie developers would have been worried about this exploit for a long time.
What do you think of the new release date change system in Steam by Valve? Post your comments below.
