You might have seen that for today’s grub, Edwin decided to in part feed The Maw with Food Devils, an incredibly salacious, foodie take on Fire Emblem, as it was meant to release today. The only problem is, it’s not actually out yet. That might prompt you to call Edwin a rotten liar and march up to his castle at the top of the hill on a dark and stormy night with pitchforks and torches, but I beseech you to wait, because it’s actually Steam’s fault. And potentially, it’s the fault of all those awful AI games that have been flooding Steam recently.
In a Steam blog post shared earlier today, developer Studio Daimon explained why the game isn’t able to be released today, first offering a bit of context: if you want to put your game on Steam, you have to submit for approval so that it matches what you’ve described and doesn’t harbour malware, amongst other reasons. As the post explains, “before submitting a build, devs see a disclaimer that says ‘This review typically takes 3-5 business days, but please allow up to 7 business days in case feedback needs to be addressed’.” Except the team submitted their build on October 12th, more than 20 days ago, with no approval in sight.
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The reason? “We can only assume it’s because Steam’s review queue is clogged up by AI slop, but the whole process is now taking several weeks for some developers.” For some context, Game Discovery Tool did some statistics magic and found that more than 50% of games released in October on Steam featured an AI disclosure. Valve have required that games disclose AI use since January 2024, and a year on from then in January 2025 only just over 14% of games featured such a disclosure. In January 2026, that jumped up to a little over 25%, and now here we are at more than 50%.
And to be clear, Steam releases have gone up too. According to SteamDB data, a little over 2000 games were released on the platform in October 2025. But in October 2026, that has jumped up to almost 4000. Correlation is obviously not causation, so take that with a pinch of salt. Still, it paints a concerning image over AI usage, and potentially sounds like it’s affecting how Valve operates. Almost as if allowing free reign over AI is bad, or something!
Unfortunately for Studio Daimon, there’s no estimate on when Food Devils might launch. “Even now, we don’t know when Steam will give us the final OK to finally release our game,” they wrote. “We sent another ticket last week saying that the situation was urgent and that we might miss our release date because of this, but it also got ignored. I’m sure that their staff is just too overwhelmed at the moment, but these sudden and massive delays have affected many developers throughout October, with some even being forced to postpone their releases… including us.”
They’re hoping to still be able to release it by the end of the week, but “can’t make any plans or promises because it’s out of our control.” Perhaps in the meantime, for those who like what’s cooking in the devs’ kitchen, we could throw the game a wishlist to be ready for whenever it does launch.