Are Steam curators worth it? What the data and developers say

What Valve says you get

Valve's own documentation is plain about it: "There is no obligation on the part of Steam Curators to accept, play, or review your game." You can offer your game to up to 100 curators, with up to 5 copies each (Steamworks: Curators and Curator Connect). So the ceiling is set by who accepts, and the data below says most pages are not busy.

What curators are doing right now

I read the latest 100 posts of the 1,185 curators with 200 or more followers, out of 4,756 in Steam's directory.

• 83% of them posted in the last 90 days. The median active one posted 10 times in that time.
• From Oct 6, 2026 to Nov 4, 2026, 756 curators posted 11,114 times about 6,030 games. At least half the games curators covered got a post from just one curator without several signs.
• 17% show three or more warning signs of reselling keys. A key sent to one of these is a key lost.

The reading is simple. A new game gets posts from a handful of curators in a month, if it gets any, and a good share of the pages that could post are not active or are not real readers' pages.

What developers report

A developer on itch.io sent keys to 77 curators, "including some famous ones", and got one review after two weeks (itch.io thread). Scarecrow Studio, writing in December 2024, said key-scam curator groups "typically have around 20,000 followers, all of which are likely purchased" (itch.io). A curator wrote in May 2026 that many big pages "used bots to pump up their followers count" (Lewd Games Reviewers).

Developers have logged 0 keys here. A post rate needs 10 decided keys; as 30-day outcomes come in, the rate shows here and on each curator's page.

I don't have numbers on wishlists or sales that come from curator reviews, and Steam doesn't publish them. Anyone quoting a conversion rate for curators is guessing.

When it is worth it

• Your game fits a genre with active curators. horror games (779 curators), puzzle games (762 curators), first-person shooters (650 curators), action roguelikes (629 curators) have many. A narrow genre may have a dozen.
• You pick by comparable games. A curator who covered three games like yours in the last few months is likely to accept a fourth. How to build the list.
• You send fewer, better offers. Twenty to forty matched curators is a reasonable list. Sending 100 by follower count is the path to one review.
• You have two or three weeks before launch or a Next Fest. A post after the event helps less.

When it is not

If your store page isn't live, you can't use Curator Connect at all. If the build is rough, a curator who tries it will leave a "not recommended" post or nothing. And if your plan relies on curators for most of your launch traffic, it is thin: wishlists, your own channels and press do more.

A cheap way to test it

Pick the curators who posted most recently and have no warning signs. The busiest in the last 30 days are Does This Game Use GenAI? (2.6k followers, 60 posts), IndieGems (17k followers, 59 posts), Games under 1GB (652 followers, 56 posts), Rootkit Anti-Cheats (3.6k followers, 53 posts), Games at risk of removal (44k followers, 49 posts). Send them your game with two lines on why it fits, and check Curator Connect's dashboard after two weeks for how many accepted. Then log the result here, so the next developer sees which curators post after getting a key.