Steam Next Fest is being flooded with thousands of low-effort games, while developers are becoming reluctant to share their work for fear of seeing it quickly cloned.
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.
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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.
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 :
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.