That’s fine and I like that. We, the gamers, we can decide and it should be like that. We just need Valve’s assistance by helping us with thorough AI disclosures. We can do the rest by controlling slop and clones with our wallets and filters.
The issue is when a game is announced but not released, and a slop idiot cucks his way into a shitty copy and releases it under a very similar name. Needle in a Haystack Simulator is the real game, unreleased still i think, and someone made and is actively selling AI garbage Needle In A Haystack.
Thats blatant copyright infringement or something. It should not be allowed. All it does is confuse people who hear about it from a friend and look it up without knowing the actual name, buy it, and dislike it when they very much could have enjoyed the real game.
Itd be like if i saw a trailer for Dark Souls and made a game called Darksouls that kinda looks like it and takes story beats from the trailer.
is ai a tool or a crutch?
Hey Valve, could you use AI to port all of your own old Intel versions of Mac games to Apple Silicon?
deleted by creator
This is the exact same attitude they had to the deluge of unity store asset flips (well they actually tried to blame unity for that, but I digress)
Steam gets their money either way.
And that’s what Lord GabeN needs to buy another super yacht for himself, and more Aston Martins for his son to race.
I am starting to think that having hard technical or imposed market limits might be a good thing, or at least the lesser of two evils.
It you had to build a game on before the era of cheap middleware engines, there was a natural barrier to entry. The Nintendo seal of approval used to mean something at least even if the game was still trash.
But now, you can flood the space with minimal barrier to entry and we are being flooded with junk. But those that control the access and making big money off this so they turn a blind eye.
A few months back, there was a reddit post for my local town, it was about self publishing their new game on Steam. Anyway, about a dozen others posted links to their projects all releasing within the next few months, all of them copies or low effort projects. This is a single town, in a single country, that is releasing potentially dozens, possible hundreds of games a year. The market is flooded because we have made it so easy to pump this junk out and there is little interest in putting even vague restrictions on it.
The crash is coming and we will all know why it happened.
It’s been coming for a long time. Steam always had a slop problem since the greenlight days.
The reason so much shit got onto the platform was by exploiting the trading card system, and Valve allowed it.
Eventually Valve realised they could get more money by just skipping the vote, and allowing people to just pay to get their games on the platform.
Pretty much. They already had this tendency, it is just accelerating and now the technology has kicked it into turbo.
I can’t believe the sentiment in the comments here.
…Y’all think spammers are going to label themselves as “AI generated” if that’s detrimental? They will not, and it’s not something that can be objectively detected.
Getting customers to moderate this is self defeating, as the whole point of spam is to get in front of buyers’ eyeballs.
Valve needs to hire staff to cull this junk, they can afford to, but they don’t want to. That’s the crux of the issue.
There’s also a practical element, where Steam is not in a position to vet every game and developer. They could have the community do it, but that then opens up a whole bunch of abuse risks.
There’s also an argument that it wouldn’t stop some of the issues in the article. Where do you draw the line with asset flip, or AI generated? If the developer used AI to make placeholders in the early access of a game, and then swapped it with removed it later on, is the game still AI generated? What if they used assets that were unknowingly AI generated, like stock sound effects?
Or if someone is ESL and used a translator that turned out to be AI powered/they just write with a similar style.
It also won’t stop people doing it.maliciously. if you’re threatening to clone someone’s game off a demo, and release it before they do, you’re probably not going to stop because you need to put a little “AI generated” flag on your game, if the rest of it didn’t stop you.
Indeed, cloners will find ways to flood the market, because that’s the effective way.
As someone who likes to discuss about solutions, time is something the cloners do not have. They are always trying to clone the currently trending things, so they cannot wait for three months or so for the trend to die out.
I would say a mandatory 3 month period of closed beta would help cull many bad actors, with strict requirements as what would suffice. Valve could in the meanwhile scan in case the assets are stolen from another games listed in their store.
Assets can be packed or otherwise obfuscated in all sorts of ways.
I’m less certain about the “3 month forced waiting period” thing… it sounds like a good idea on the surface, but I just wonder how it might affect small devs. Also, some spammers would still immediately schedule a listing for a clone and then vibecode it over the three months.
That might be true but it still seems like it might significantly hampers the trend chasing clone effect. Its not stopping the cloners from making the clones but throwing them off of the trend rhythm and making the clone less able to skim money from people. A legit dev will likely have to take into account the waiting period but that can just be part of their dev cycle now. Or maybe if your studio is partnered with an already established publisher, you can just release the game no waiting. I know that sucks for fully independent devs but there are extremely indie friendly publishers out there like Devolver Digital.
I’d be behind spot-checking at the very least. I feel like Valve is trustworthy enough that most devs should be able to open-source their code to Valve.
If you get caught, you get perma-banned from Steam.
Then put a little thingie showing how many years a dev has existed (so people can put their AI-detector thinking caps on when they see a dev that’s existed for 3 months putting out a fully polished game).
With all due respect, this is exactly what I am talking about.
I feel like Valve is trustworthy enough that most devs should be able to open-source their code to Valve.
Enforcing posting code source isn’t viable for many reasons. But one is that spammers are going to hide the vibecoding anyway; this would only catch relatively innocent coding assistants from earnest devs.
It wouldn’t catch anything malicious.
Then put a little thingie showing how many years a dev has existed (so people can put their AI-detector thinking caps on when they see a dev that’s existed for 3 months putting out a fully polished game).
And again, the point of spamming is to get eyeballs in front of customers. It doesn’t matter if 99% reject it as obvious garbage; if just a few people buy it on chance, it’s worth the minimal effort for the spammer, and it encourages other spammers to come.
…And that would be catastrophic to new devs, anyway. How is anyone new supposed to enter the space and publish their labor of love if everyone assumes new devs are malicious?
Sorry if this comes off as thorny, I feel like commenters here are contorting themselves to excuse a giant corporation.
This is Valve’s storefront. They make mountains of cash from it.
It is their job to filter spam, they need to spend money to do it, and they don’t want to. There is no way around it.
It’s not thorny to me, but then I’m used to polite disagreement where I’ve found many would turn hostile, so perhaps your padding at the end was a good plan - even if not necessary for me personally.
You raise good points, but it’s one of those “Don’t let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good” things. No system can catch 100% of these problems that you correctly point out. At least, none that I can imagine nor that you propose.
Right now, Valve is the “best” video game distributor - apart from maybe GoG. I hope GoG dethrones them as the only reasons Valve is “better” are Linux support and market dominance (ergo convenience), and perhaps the AI craze will be the wedge issue that GoG takes a firm stance against, at which point they’d be in a good spot to take over.
Unfortunately, I strongly suspect the vast majority of consumers simply do not care if a game was developed with AI.
All that to say: I agree they should be doing more, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Right now, Valve is the “best” video game distributor - apart from maybe GoG. I hope GoG dethrones them as the only reasons Valve is “better” are Linux support and market dominance (ergo convenience), and perhaps the AI craze will be the wedge issue that GoG takes a firm stance against, at which point they’d be in a good spot to take over.
Again, I emphasize: you are talking about this as if picking a team.
These are storefronts, run by corporations. I don’t care if Valve is percieved as “good” or not, I care about the current and future transactional services they will offer me, and how they will affect the market as a whole.
And this is bad. Its toxic for game devs, bad for me as a shopper, and unhealthy for the future of gaming.
Vavle do not deserve excuses and hand-waving just because one thinks they are a ‘lesser evil’ in some other context; every service should get criticized a-la-carte. They are not people, they do not get passes.
The mindset of loyalty and “thrones” and “who is nicer” is exactly the sort of anthropomorphic mindset they want you in. Its the goal of advertising. They want you loyal to their storefront, so at some point, it becomes an irrational factor that influences your shopping choices… Hence this comment section.
All that to say: I agree they should be doing more, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Indeed.
But I’m not going to apologize for Valve in the same breath eather, and I am appaled so many commenters here are. They would be skewering them if this was some other strorefront doing the exact same thing.
Again, I emphasize: you are talking about this as if picking a team.
Yeah, I mean, gotta buy video games from someone. Valve’s one of the least shitty corporations by far, so they get my money.
Vavle do not deserve excuses and hand-waving just because one thinks they are a ‘lesser evil’ in some other context; every service should get criticized a-la-carte.
Why don’t you think I’m open to a-la-carte criticism? I’ve expressed plainly that it’s valid. Do you want me to fight you about it or something?
They are not people, they do not get passes.
I would say people don’t get passes either; I could quote Stannis the Mannis, but I won’t.
But I’m not going to apologize for Valve in the same breath eather, and I am appaled so many commenters here are.
Are you ranting with me or at me here? I never “apologized” for them.
Enforce an AI label, abusers get delisted and not allowed to be on steam for 3-5 years. Allow users to block AI labeled games.
Edit: I think the ban should affect the developer and publisher too. That way the publisher makes efforts to prevent release of slop too.
100% this.
if using AI in your product adds so much value to your product, then why are you hiding it??
Why would anyone making AI spam label their spam as AI?
Presumably some may try to slip it through. That’s where community and Valve have to step in to police it together to get the dev and publisher banned for a duration.
Because if they don’t they get banned which makes their shoveling harder.
This is like the Wii shovelware era on steroids.
No need to be gatekeepers, just let me blacklist entire genres, publishers and studios.
That hurts Valve’s bottom line.
Never going to happen
You can. Add tags/genres to your ignored list, and you won’t see any games marked with them.
Been blocking EA games for years.
The tag system has been so badly abused that you can’t do this without collateral damage though. It’s not fit for purpose. I have mixed feelings about Valve curating games… but I think they should absolutely curate the tags.
Valve should have staff manually play through 144k games to make sure all the tags are accurate?
Yes, they can afford to ensure the quality of their systems.
What you’re asking for is not trivial. Just for the backlog, assuming a single scant hour per game, is 70 new full-time positions before getting into the organizational and administrative overhead. That’s the absolute bare minimum to load up and investigate a game and categorize it and it only works for things that are clearly defined from the very beginning. Realistically there’s no way they can sift through all the assets and code in that time for, as an example, signs of AI use even if they had full access to the developer’s work files. What you’re asking for is more like a full week audit on average.
I’m pretty sure they can afford it. But I’d be happy for the tag system to continue being meaningless if they would just hoist genre out into a separate system curated only by Valve.
As far as I can tell, you can only add about 10 tags to the ignore list. That’s way too few for me.
Walmart sells a ton of shit I think is stupid. Sometimes I see it in the store. It really doesn’t bother me, I go to the aisle for what I want, consider the options, pick one and buy it.
I’m staunchly against smoking. Cigarettes are sold in many stores, but the packs all have warning labels on them making it very easy for me to make sure I never accidentally buy cigarettes. So far, it’s been pretty easy to avoid.
I don’t need to talk to the clerk when I walk in and ask them to hide all the products I hate, as long as everything is labeled and I can buy what I intend to buy, it’s really not a problem. It’s a store.
That’s not the issue here. They are free to have whatever games they want in the store, I don’t care.
The issue is: if you have a recommendation system in place (like the Discovery Queue, which I use and have found great games on), you’d better let me customize it so I don’t recommended yet another hentai puzzle instead of a nice boomer shooter. Just this. I just want some control on what I’m being recommended.
Account settings > Store preferences > uncheck “Adult Only Sexual Content”
That wouldn’t solve the issue of you’re fine with hentai games, just not the puzzle ones.
I just want a sequel to The Guy Game so I pair it up with its brother I have on this very real shelf I have that holds this also very real physical copy of this game I have amongst other games like Donkey Kong Country 1+2+3, Rollercoaster Tycoon, 1+2, Goldeneye n Perfect Dark, and Myst n Riven. Shame they didn’t make more games in the Myst series. Could have been a great series of, I dunno, five or so games and a book series, but they stopped making them after the second installment as my definitely not self-neuralized brain is telling me. The books were good though. But what were we talking about? Nine-tenths of the law? Tf does that shit mean? Bueller?
Shame they didn’t make more games in the Myst series.
Lol, maybe they could make one with Brad Dourif, I heard he’s available.
there is myst 3, 4, and 5 with 5 being a definitive end to the series
If you liked myst and riven you’d probably like them as well. The series was pretty strong if you’re into the whole “narrative over gameplay” thing. At the time they were also widely regarded for the graphical quality but that obviously didn’t hold up
If you liked those point and click adventure games the journeyman project trilogy from presto studios in the same era is also great, though there was supposed to be a 4th installment that was cancelled. The Lucasarts and sierra games from a bit earlier in that genre (the dig, sam and max hit the road, Indiana jones and the fate of Atlantis, day of the tentacle, police quest, kings quest, monkey island, etc) are also great
Getting all of these games to run on a modern pc is a bit of a headache though. Some are on gog and some have support in scummvm but not all. The renaissance of point and click adventure was like 1995-2000 and the genre really died around then. Great games, although they can be extremely frustrating and obtuse at times
…I know…
…the joke was I was traumatized by how shit they were that my brain overwrote the memories…
They can tell them to let us gatekeep. Ai needs to be labeled.
Let’s hope GOG takes a better approach
Well that’s disappointing. How about in regard to vibe coded games?
They don’t adopt enough games for it to be problem.
Let’s hope that works in their favour
Nope they already using Ai.
A lot of developers have already pulled their demos from Steam for fear of them being cloned.
Either Valve takes a stance against slop clones, or they’re going to alienate indie devs (and probably the big ones too), and with them a lot of their customers.
Valve have to decide if they want Steam to be a thriving games store or an abandoned slop repository.
And “making no decision” is choosing the latter.
I don’t think many people here actually read the article, valve said they immediately noticee the takeover of slop during the next fest and have already committed a significant amount of their team to tackling this. All they said was ATM there is no stance/solution. They also mentioned that games with real effort put in will be prioritized.
They aren’t letting slop roll them over lol
That’s corporate speak for “seen ✅”. I know people love Valve, but this is very standard playbook for how they operate in PR. Acknowledge the problem, say they are working on it, maybe in a year or 2 we get a nugget of an attempt to kinda poke at the problem.
Maybe Valve will prove me wrong here since this is ramping up quickly, but this also isn’t anything that will threaten their monopoly in short order. If I was GOG, I’d be taking a hard anti-AI stance between Valve’s timid response and Tim Sweeney’s full on cannonball and reinforce what they already do in curating for handcrafted games.
—–
And I don’t think the rest of their statement is promising. First part (the title) is irrelevant: you don’t need to gatekeep tools to gatekeep obvious slop copies of games already announced and upcoming on your platform. Let along a bare quality window. Valve did that gatekeeping for the first 60% of its life. Maybe we need that back.
Second part is borderline tonedeaf :
Noting that games were being cloned long before AI came on the scene—just at a much slower pace—Giardino suggested that developers can protect their work by first building a strong community around it, and then focusing on continual improvements: “Rather than relying on a single mechanic that someone can easily copy, you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality, and creativity that stem from your own perspective.”
So, “yeah just market more and work harder”. The two expensive parts of making a game. From a billion dollar corporation. If any other AAA studio said this it’d be ratio’d to hell.
You’re right to wait and see, but, at the same time, you amswered for a lot of people here when you said it’s ramping up.
Sony’s catalogue and PS5Z was literally just a week ago or slightly more than that. Numerous similar cases are breaking out, and, I hate to say it, but other bad actors are also taking this chance as a free for all to target more vulnerable indies.
Valve isn’t acting yet presumably because they want to see where this is all heading and then align accordinly. Is there going to be new govie policy? A new breakthrough in AI development? New standardisation on Github? No one knows.
Short of Gaben uploading his own custom made AI into Steam, it really is best to pray things turn out well.
They aren’t letting slop roll over them
And yet it rolls.
I recently looked up Family Time because of the hype (and the Papa! melted my brovaries), but of course there’s a clone with a fox lady already. That made me mad.
At least two of them, apparently, one with even the same exact name 🤮 (how is that allowed?).
Game’s not my cup of tea, but I tagged both clones as slop (can’t report them because none of the reasons would apply, as this kind of cloning is still legal), not that it’ll do any good.
Least Vave could do is add “blatant slop clone” to the reasons to report a game.
so, let the market kill them then. dont buy the stuff and if you do, refund and delete
That’s the entire fucking problem: the market CAN’T kill them because they cost nothing to make.
And even if you take one down, it could just be uploaded again as another person.
It’s basically like the problems with mobile games or YouTube channels. People are clearly using a template/framework, and can release billions of them. So when one gets taken down, another can just pop up.
And if Steam is too hard on small devs, they start locking out indie devs or people who genuinely put effort in. There’s no good answers.
Supposedly a lot of the big model companies are putting in watermarks, but they generally don’t publicly release the exact things they’re checking for, and it differs per model, so it’s not like there’s a good reliable method of picking it out either.
It’ll become less of a problem when they charge full price for tokens
Not really, as inference costs are plummeting because of the architectures open models use.
the market can get them removed from the virtual shelf if left alone long enough
Plans which require everyone to act in unison based on having perfect information are unrealistic.
Also, that system is easy enough to disrupt by bad actors.
yeah i lnow but realistically we dont have any other ways to do it
Gateway proprietor doesn’t want to gatekeep
Gateway
🐮📦
I don’t speak hieroglyphic
Kind of a sick burn seeing as that emoji combo relates to a defunct computer manufacturing company and is a suitable age gate for people born after 2000
It also gatekeeps non-Americans, I assume; I had to puzzle out the meaning and while the name Gateway does ring a bell (I probably saw it on some ad or CRT monitor at some point) I’d have never associated it with the cow and box emojis. 🤷♂️
I’m glad we’re all having fun, but I just don’t have time for people who won’t say what they mean right now. It’s exhausting!
