In the wake of witnessing an unprecedented number of game submissions to Steam over the last few months, Valve has been forced to delay approvals in order to deal with the existing backlog.

Following complaints by game developers on social media and elsewhere, Valve has now responded to explain why it's taking longer to get games approved. The short version: re-reviews are clogging up the system.

"We aim to test every game build in a timely manner, typically within three-five business days," Valve wrote in a Steam post. "However, we're running a little behind right now and taking up to 12 business days. Much of that delay is due to having to re-review games, which isn't great for you or for us."

As Valve explained in the post, games need to be re-reviewed when they're rejected for missing key quality assurance checks. In an effort to make it easier for developers to get it right the first time, Valve updated the Steam release checklist to include new, tighter requirements.

These include a requirement to run the game through Steam for at least five minutes. According to Valve, some of the games submitted have not been played through Steam.

"This means that even if a game runs smoothly when a dev launches their executable directly, they might have missed basic steps that would impact a user installing and playing via Steam," Valve explained.

NET, XNA. While Steam can automatically install many common redistributables, it needs to know which ones are needed (if any).

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