3 Weeks of Shipping: What's New in the Dev Hub & Creator Hub

The pool more than doubled

First, the part that matters most to anyone joining today: the pool. Three weeks ago the hub held about 130 approved games. Today it's 330+ games from 290+ studios, with 40+ bundles matched and live on Steam and dozens more in talks. On the other side sits a creator base of 24,000+ content creators plus a hand-vetted Creator Hub where every member was approved by a human.

Free-to-play games can join now too - Valve doesn't allow F2P titles in bundles, so they skip the bundling side and plug straight into the creator machinery with a "play it free" button instead of keys.

Self-serve creator mailings

The biggest new thing. Announcing your game to 1,000+ curated content creators used to be something we set up by hand. Now it's a configurator inside the hub: pick your game, paste your Steam keys, tweak the subject, intro and selling points (the mail is pre-filled from your Steam page, down to a color palette picked from your header art), send yourself a test mail, and submit. We do one human sanity check, then it goes out - and you watch live numbers: sent, opens, key claims, keys left, waitlist.

• Who claimed a key - a list of the actual creators, with their platform and, when they're verified Creator Hub members, their reputation tier and delivered coverage. Names link to public creator pages.
• Manual approval mode - flip one switch and creators request keys instead of grabbing them; you approve each request yourself, right in the hub.
• Smart audience selection - every wave picks the best-fit creators for YOUR game from the whole base: what they've claimed and covered before, genre affinity and engagement, with rotation so the same inboxes aren't hammered twice.
• Audience top-ups - shipped this week: grow any wave by +1,000 extra best-fit creators for $9.99 a step, stackable up to the whole base. The first developer bought one within two hours of the button going live.

One key pool per game

Fresh from this week: your game now has one pool of Steam keys, no matter where you paste them - the My Games box or the mailing configurator, it all lands in the same place. Creator Hub members can claim from the pool the moment keys arrive (your community always gets first dibs, and top-tier creators get early access to fresh drops). When your mailing launches, it takes whatever is left in the pool with it. And about two weeks after the wave finishes, every key nobody claimed by mail flows back into the pool automatically, so it keeps working for you in the hub. No key is ever stranded, and the same key can never be handed to two people - the system deduplicates across every channel.

Know what your keys did: coverage, mentions, previews

• Coverage tracking - a bot watches YouTube and Steam curator pages for coverage of your game and shows every video with view counts and an estimated media value (what that coverage would cost as sponsored content).
• Media mentions - every approved game is scanned for web mentions across Reddit, news sites and Bluesky, listed right in your game's panel.
• In-app Steam previews - screenshots and auto-playing micro-trailers open inside the hub, so judging a bundle partner no longer means twenty store tabs.
• Free Steam page audits - still there, still free: an automated checklist plus genre benchmarks for your store page.

Matching got a directory, detail pages and themes

Swiping is still the fun way in, but the pool is big enough now that browsing matters. Browse all games was rebuilt today as a full directory: rich cards with cover art, descriptions, review scores and fit notes, on numbered pages with genre, stage and sort filters - propose a bundle to any game directly. Matches and open bundle boards got collapsible overviews, shareable detail pages, board themes (a horror board stays a horror board), click-tracking on Steamworks invites, and polite automated nudges when a partner stalls - so bundles actually reach the finish line.

The Creator Hub grew up

The other half of the site is a free, human-approved hub where creators claim keys for the whole catalog. In three weeks it gained:

• Request any Steam game - search all of Steam, hit "Request keys", and we email that developer that creators are waiting. If they join, you get wishlisted automatically. A creator suggested it on a Monday; it was live the same week.
• Direct messages to developers - every game card has a "Message the dev" button now. Creators write first, developers reply in their hub, and nobody's email is ever exposed.
• Reputation tiers with real perks - deliver coverage and climb from New to Top Creator: higher daily claim caps, no coverage gate on extra keys, and early access to fresh key drops.
• Public portfolio pages - a shareable page with your platforms, genres and every piece of coverage on file, linked wherever developers see your name.
• A release calendar with cover art, genre alerts when matching keys land, wishlist notifications, a browsable catalog of fresh Steam releases, and clear ground rules (no obligations, no embargoes, no deadlines - any format counts).

We pitched Steam an official festival

The big swing: we proposed "Better Together: Bundle Fest" to Valve - the first Steam festival built around bundle pairs, where every participating game appears together with its bundle partner and discounted bundles run all week. It is a proposal under review, not a confirmed event, but the submission is in, the lineup keeps growing, and you can follow the Steam group to be there if it lands.

Get in - it's free

Everything above ships on the same rule the hub started with: join free, add your game by its Steam appid, and match with a bundle partner the same day. Creators apply once, get approved by a human, and claim keys for the whole catalog. And if you have feedback - that's literally where this entire post came from. Almost every feature here was someone's Discord message three weeks ago.