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the 2nd annual Fall in Love Visual Novel Festival will be held on Tuesday, with a big caveat - at the last minute, we've had basic featuring taken away from us, namely the store page banners that appear on the top of the store page for games in a festival that lets people know there's a festival.

I submitted the festival for review over the weekend hoping it'd be quick, but early this week they responded saying my festival had "grown substantially" from my original pitch in June and due to the amount of appIDs we wouldn'tbe eligible for basic featuring like the store page banner.

I corrected them and counted the appIDs, showing it hadn't grown hardly at all and the additional appIDs were all DLC. I asked if there was anything I could do to fix this such as removing all of the DLC from the festival, since the store page banner is the main way games crosspromote festivals.

I also asked why this wasn't brought up when I originally submitted the festival & it was approved months ago. neither of these were addressed, it was only reiterated that I had too many games & wouldn't be eligible. they said recently this year Steam only wants to feature festivals under 150 games.

I asked again if there was anything I could do to remedy the situation - if I had been told in advance I could, but being told mere days before my festival only hurts the developers participating. why wasn't I informed of this before? why only days before we launched? and why the sudden change?

last year we got front page featuring - this year we won't even get a store page banner, which used to be basic, standard featuring. making festival rule changes every month isn't new but retroactively applying new rules to returning, pre-existing festivals is stressful and will harm the festival.

I tried my best to get front page featuring this year but I never would've thought this would happen. I really wanted to work something out to keep the banner but I wasn't given the opportunity. I'm sorry to all of the developers in Fall in Love Festival that will suffer lower views because of this.

why did this happen? I assume they're trying to cull the amount of festival pitches they receive. however, applying these rules flatly across all festivals—including existing, previously approved ones—and retroactively applying rules to festivals in progress only hurts developers (and players).

festivals are a lot of work & stress but I do love seeing so many people come together for VNs. however, I was a wreck this week because of this. the amount of extra stress this added on me after everything was ready to go was enormous. it highly makes me reconsider hosting any Steam festival again.

Would it be possible for me to share the list of games with my audience so they have an idea of who's participating? I know it was originally intended for festival participants only, but I was wondering if that might help get more eyes on the games.