Steam’s New Season Pass DLC Rules – Publish or Die!

You Shall Not Delay Season Pass DLC … More Than Once!

Steam, or Valve if you prefer, are getting sick and tired of fielding complaints from customers that bought a Season Pass to a game to get hold of all the future DLC, only to wait months or sometimes years for the publisher to actually get around to releasing it.  The game developers and publishers are to blame for the delays, but it is Steam that gets to deal with refund requests and general whinging, so they’ve put their foot down.

Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN posted the new rules, which in short state that Valve will allow developers “to self-reschedule the release date one time only” by “up to 3 months later than you originally selected”.  This also means that whenever a Season Pass is offered on Steam, the game must state the content of each DLC and its release date when that Season Pass is first offered.  Failure to do so may result in the Season Pass being pulled from Steam and any customers refunded the amount they paid for it.  One can hope this will also help with the sale bundles offered on Steam that generate cart errors when a Season Pass and some DLC included in the Season Pass are added to the cart at the same time.

Amusingly this will not apply to a Season Pass that was bought as part of a pre-order.  After all, those foolish enough to pre-order are betting on the game actually being released, let alone knowing when the actual release date might be.