I bet, apart from very few obscure 1 man indie games, every project has seen help by AI. To what extend might differ but that’s nowhere reflected. Either they lie or have that AI badge.
The Steam AI badge is specifically about gen-AI assets. A game that’s 100% vibe coded, but uses human art, doesn’t need the badge according to Steam rules.
And while AI assistance with code is common, gen-AI assets not so much.
DLSS is GenAI, but you get crucified if you don’t have it. At the same time if you report using it by applying the badge, you also get crucified. There is no widely liked game on Steam from the last five years that doesn’t have some genAI somewhere, unless they’re visibly small in scope. If you just build an Unreal or Unity sample project it’ll already have GenAI (assisted) fonts and (GenAI denoised) sound effects, and probably a lot more.
Somehow games have transported the “No VFX” Hollywood marketing.
Where does it say that? Their content survey details for when developers are meant to disclose AI usage simply refers to it as the use of AI in generating “content” which would cover code since the mechanical implementations etc are all “content”.
A 100% vibe coded game should be disclosing as AI pre-generated content.
We are aware that many modern game development environments have AI powered tools built into them. Efficiency gains through the use of these tools is not the focus of this section. Instead, it is concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players. This includes content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc.
What you linked is pretty clear to me. Tools and code are not “content”. That’s Valve’s intent.
So basically, even if it’s okay on release, it’ll never receive an update or bug fixes, because the “dev” literally has no idea what’s actually going on.
Just a hunch that vibe coders don’t have the patience to learn the fundamentals of how their project is actually working, let alone understand methods for fixing the back end or be good enough at using an LLM to try get it to do it well.
Some people would use vibe coding to learn, but “laziness” is a far common occurring adjective with vibe and coded projects require a lot of patience and knowing what’s going on.
Yep. I mean, any game running on Unreal Engine at this point would probably need to have that badge. So many games are also using various bits of middleware that have probably had AI contributions by now. And that’s just the technical side of it. Art and dialog are also seeing a lot of AI use these days.
That’s incorrect. The Steam AI badge only concerns gen-AI assets, not code. So UE or middleware that was coded with AI doesn’t make the game need the badge at all. Whether you agree with that or not is another thing, but that’s the current Steam rules. AI disclosure is only for assets, not code.
Genuinely, it would be dumb not to. Especially solo or low dev count.
I complete most of my code so the idea and structure is out there. Final phase of optimise and tidy up, LLM. Sometimes one or two things get pointed out, the other day like 15+. It was a complex job, I’d been at it for hours, my brain was fried. Plenty of stuff got ignored, but a few things were, “Oh my god I’m an idiot.” One of those days where you forget you did a thing a couple hours ago, then do it again but in a totally different way, making the old thing redundant, but it still churns… I do that a lot of I don’t have a plan and a checklist for it.
I bet, apart from very few obscure 1 man indie games, every project has seen help by AI. To what extend might differ but that’s nowhere reflected. Either they lie or have that AI badge.
The Steam AI badge is specifically about gen-AI assets. A game that’s 100% vibe coded, but uses human art, doesn’t need the badge according to Steam rules.
And while AI assistance with code is common, gen-AI assets not so much.
DLSS is GenAI, but you get crucified if you don’t have it. At the same time if you report using it by applying the badge, you also get crucified. There is no widely liked game on Steam from the last five years that doesn’t have some genAI somewhere, unless they’re visibly small in scope. If you just build an Unreal or Unity sample project it’ll already have GenAI (assisted) fonts and (GenAI denoised) sound effects, and probably a lot more.
Somehow games have transported the “No VFX” Hollywood marketing.
Where does it say that? Their content survey details for when developers are meant to disclose AI usage simply refers to it as the use of AI in generating “content” which would cover code since the mechanical implementations etc are all “content”.
A 100% vibe coded game should be disclosing as AI pre-generated content.
What you linked is pretty clear to me. Tools and code are not “content”. That’s Valve’s intent.
Oh, my… 100% vibe coded is excluded?!
So basically, even if it’s okay on release, it’ll never receive an update or bug fixes, because the “dev” literally has no idea what’s actually going on.
Or the alternative - it will receive updates and bug fixes
What does that have to do with AI?
Just a hunch that vibe coders don’t have the patience to learn the fundamentals of how their project is actually working, let alone understand methods for fixing the back end or be good enough at using an LLM to try get it to do it well.
Some people would use vibe coding to learn, but “laziness” is a far common occurring adjective with vibe and coded projects require a lot of patience and knowing what’s going on.
Yep. I mean, any game running on Unreal Engine at this point would probably need to have that badge. So many games are also using various bits of middleware that have probably had AI contributions by now. And that’s just the technical side of it. Art and dialog are also seeing a lot of AI use these days.
That’s incorrect. The Steam AI badge only concerns gen-AI assets, not code. So UE or middleware that was coded with AI doesn’t make the game need the badge at all. Whether you agree with that or not is another thing, but that’s the current Steam rules. AI disclosure is only for assets, not code.
Then the badge is useless. I want to know that Claude didn’t hide an RCE vulnerability in my latest friendslop release.
Genuinely, it would be dumb not to. Especially solo or low dev count.
I complete most of my code so the idea and structure is out there. Final phase of optimise and tidy up, LLM. Sometimes one or two things get pointed out, the other day like 15+. It was a complex job, I’d been at it for hours, my brain was fried. Plenty of stuff got ignored, but a few things were, “Oh my god I’m an idiot.” One of those days where you forget you did a thing a couple hours ago, then do it again but in a totally different way, making the old thing redundant, but it still churns… I do that a lot of I don’t have a plan and a checklist for it.