PC Gaming

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.

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

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

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".)

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

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.

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.

What the actual fuck

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.