About a week ago, a first-time game developer working on the social deduction multiplayer title Red Flag posted on the IndieDev subreddit regarding their recent positive experience with Valve’s Steam Support. After accidentally submitting an unlaunchable build on the day of the deadline, they found that instead of requesting fixes or rejecting the game, the reviewers in charge of the approval process fixed it themselves, just in time for Steam’s June Next Fest.
According to the dev, Red Flag Team uploaded its demo build on the day of the Next Fest deadline, forgetting that the approval process normally takes five to seven days. This meant that if the game wasn’t approved the very same day, it would miss the opportunity to participate in an important event for gaining visibility on the platform. After realizing their mistake and sending a follow-up email, they were told that the game would be forwarded for urgent review.
Though the build was approved after a few hours, Valve noted that the game had actually failed to launch due to an incorrect configuration of the Visual C++ Redistributable files required to run the game.
However, instead of rejecting the build or sending it back to the devs for fixing (verifying that the product build is executable is part of the review process), the reviewer instead personally edited the configuration and sorted the redistributables before approving the game.
In response to the Reddit post, several indie devs shared similar experiences of how Valve fixed the redistributables on their games just in time to meet a deadline. It appears that this is a common mistake many first-time Steam publishers make, and those in charge have gotten used to fixing the problem themselves without changing the overall build.
Thanks to Valve’s help, Red Flag’s demo was able to participate in the June Next Fest, its Steam Wishlists nearly doubled, and the devs are seeing players in their lobby.
Red Flag is set to release in Early Access on July 14 for Windows (Steam). A free demo is also available.
