A Season Pass is a pack of current and future downloadable content (also known as DLCs) for an existing game, and which customers can avail with a single purchase. Essentially, a Season Pass is a DLC pre-purchase, as developers are promising future content for their games in a set amount of time.

The changes to Steam are meant to increase transparency and protect gamers from unclear promises around future content. In the past, season passes often didn't provide enough details about the extra content and when it would be released.

You shouldn’t pre-order games, but people do it all the time anyway. Increasingly, people have gotten in the habit of pre-ordering DLC too, paying up front for content that won’t be delivered for months or even years,

If you aren’t ready to clearly communicate about the content included in each DLC AND when each DLC will be ready for launch, you shouldn’t offer a Season Pass on Steam,” Valve wrote in the documentation.

Valve says video game developers ‘shouldn’t offer a Season Pass’ if they aren’t ready to clearly communicate what’s included in the DLC.

Valve is implementing some new ground rules for how developers can offer Season Pass and DLC content on Steam, including rules aimed at cracking down on indefinite Season Pass delays, unfulfilled promises,