I think we’re reaching a point where there is going to be so much stuff around be it games, tv, movies, music, etc all made by AI and all just garbage, that it will make curating a huge deal. Like we’ll need to have services whose sole purpose is to sift through the marketplaces and find quality stuff to then present to people. So you’ll have a two tiered system where on one hand you can browse “everything” and it’s just a deluge of stuff and then on the other hand you can go to a curated marketplace that only lists stuff that is known to be high quality. But it’s going to take time for those curated places to pop up, and in the mean time we are gonna be swimming in slop.
Neal Stephenson explores these ideas in a few of his books. Basically that there is so much false information online that the biggest advantage you can have is good software for sifting through it.
Rotten Tomatoes -> Bots and Tomatoes. Is it AI slop or hot?
Hot or Bot
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 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.
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.
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.
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…
This is like the Wii shovelware era on steroids.
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.
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.
Individually, or is there a blocking feature I’m unaware of?
You can click on either the publisher or developer and there’s a setting to not recommend anything by them. IIRC it’s in a gear wheel in the top right of the developer/publisher page
That is good to know, thanks!
Thank you! Greatly appreciated!
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.
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”
They can tell them to let us gatekeep. Ai needs to be labeled.
I’d say not only labelled, but at the very least if we ain’t ostracizing generative ai being used in any part of the process, we should at least have the dignity to have it quarantined. I for one don’t feel like buying and installing malware because a yahoo who cannot actually read their own code decides to upload to Steam, let alone literally any other platform.
What about experienced developers who use AI, do they still count as a yahoo who cannot actually read their own code?
I think it’s a difficult situation because a programmer that has been making software before AI was even a thing is not the same as a vibecoder that doesn’t know what a variable is.
Depends. If they continue to use it on a regular basis, I give them a couple months before their ability starts to decline and theb apply yahoo to them. Otherwise if it’s more of a one off thing, I still personally do not trust the code but wouldn’t call them a yahoo yet.
Is the programmer reviewing the code ai shits out or blindly trusting it?
You’re already using an operating system where generative AI was being used in some parts of the process and creative tools have had generative AI functions since even before the LLM craze.
If we are talking autocomplete for IDEs, not generative AI. Also, a lot of the predictive code lines thing are just based off of what’s most likely to come next, as ( most likely ) trained off of others work. Whereas I’d argue that is different enough from an LLM since it’s basically the IDE version of the autocomplete on your smart phones keyboard app ( if you keep it on ). For LLMs, I would argue that they generate generic code that majority of the time needs cleaned up in order to even function since it will often, especially from back before I ditched it, look at your request saying you are using a specific language version and disregard because it thinks it can just use any code from that language and it’ll work. Don’t even get me started on how generative AI companies purposefully make their “software” write code in a way that is extremely bloated snd could easily be cut down to a couple lines just so they can say how their AI ( emphasis on artificial ) can write more code faster.
If we’re talking filters on art programs like Krita, also historically not completely generative AI. Majority of them ( at least on Krita ) rely on transforming your art by whatever the code says it should do as compared to generating a new image/texture. No prompt nor a need to mass steal art online in order for these filters to work. As for even something like an autofill colourize mask thing, that relies more on some form of gap detection, which isn’t considered generative AI, AFAIK. Just an advanced bucket fill tool.
If we’re talking things like ESRGAN, sure, and I absolutely have problems with that as well, but they’re ever so slightly lesser versions of the problems I have with LLMs and such.
I am well aware that some forms of it have existed for long before LLMs, but they were much more tame and weren’t being used to destroy the internet and planet to the degree it’s being used now.
Let’s hope GOG takes a better approach
They don’t adopt enough games for it to be problem.
Let’s hope that works in their favour
Well that’s disappointing. How about in regard to vibe coded games?
Nope they already using Ai.
You don’t have to tell developers anything except that they need to disclose AI use, and then you need to give customers the ability to filter them. For the sake of your platform. Because nobody wants to go through Next Fest and scroll through piles of slop or be duped into buying a sloppy game over and over.
I think filtering is the best thing they could give us as customers. They already have AI disclosures, but I don’t think we have the ability to filter for AI right now.
- Require AI tool disclosure
- Enforce that. Spot check.
- Give us a filter to show/hide AI-flagged items
For cloning, I’m not sure of the best solution. Allowing the owner and users to report it is nice. But what happens when people are coincidentally working on a very similar game and release around the same time, even without knowledge of each other?
Steam already has the first two, and I’m pretty sure it has the third because it’s illegal. It’s just a matter of effort and volume. So many generated games can be put on Steam that it’s almost impossible to keep up. If they don’t disclose generative AI usage then it takes time to discover, and that time can steal the spotlight from the legitimate games.
Valve may just have to grit their teeth and actually hire people to do community work 😞 RIP. Where will they get the money??
Yeah out of 100 vibe coded games. Iv come across like 3 that were legitimately good.
Those three where actually very very good games But they were tiny little things clearly made because the guy who made them WANTED to play them.
While the rest where just asset flips or clearly just attempting to make a cheap quick buck.
It’s just a great example of the problem. AI by itself doesn’t cause an issue. We already had this problem. Asset flips low-called a crash grabs have always been a thing.
Problem AI caused is now it’s a thousand times easier for literally every lazy f*** to do this.
Banning AI games should not happen. It is possible to make something legitimately fun and worthwhile playing with nothing but AI.
We need to solve the fact that every d****** can just s*** onto the steam store with no effort and leave something half built and abandoned.
Disclosure at a minimum. Better filtering harsher vote waiting.
My problem is every other idea I can think of unfairly smacks legitimate AI games or legitimate games that use AI as an actual proper tool as opposed to just a lazy way to asset flip.
Is not a lot of good ways to do this. To be fair, if there were we wouldn’t have asset flips in low quality cash crabs either.
People were mad at the Steam Greenlight system, so when Valve listened and opened the doors to pre-AI slop, then they started whining about their games being buried in a sea of shit. I can’t blame Valve for taking a cautious approach.
When you say cloning are you meaning like how there’s now 200 different versions of lethal company on steam now?
Some needle-in-a-haystack game came out and got cloned to death is what I’m seeing in the news. People can’t differentiate the original one vs the clones and it’s hurt sales. Some companies are stopping open betas and other things as well to avoid it being cloned before they go to full release.
I played some of them. They very different to be blatant clones. Just cloned idea
Oh damn wow
This is what they need to do. Give people the choice.
If it’s not technically doable, then we’ll do it ourselves, we’ll fight over which game is and isn’t full of slop. And, we’ll be wrong sometimes, but increasingly right. Because, soon ALL media will be full of slop, including games.
The only way to avoid it will be to play old games. Which is fine by me, but there’s always the next generation of gamers coming up who won’t be so picky.
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.
They’re basically trying to solve a problem that gaming has had for 20 years.
Low quality clones asset flips in cash grabs have always been a problem. It’s always been a problem on steam.
The issue is AI just makes it easier to do in faster to do so there’s more of them. It’s not a new problem though.
They have been trying to solve this problem for a decade. This isn’t a problem that’s likely actually solvable.
Cuz no matter what you do, you’re going to hurt legitimate devs far more than the cash. Grab guys the slop cloners.
You’re also going to knock out the slowly growing group of people who are using AI to make their little dream games but actually do it well.
There’s not a lot of them but they’re popping up on places like itch or just on GitHub pages.
I don’t envy valve the fact they’re even attempting to tackle while expected because it is their store is also genuinely commendable. Most companies would look at this go f*** that it ain’t worth the effort and then f*** off.
It’s not possible for Valve to solve with the way Valve usually approaches problems. There’s no easy way around it: you gotta scale up and do manual, human review. Algorithms and automation can’t make these judgement calls. It’s gotta be manual, it’s got to be flexible enough to get around trolling and false positives. It won’t be perfect, but no one is asking for perfection. Just a proper store and (if caught as a false positive) a reasonable response time.
Yeah - every method to prevent low quality clones would be devastating for games that are cloning the original on a high level or are massively improving on the formula. And the only way to prevent clones at all would be software patents for game mechanics and we really do not want that.
They have two options: fix it fast or die.
A store overrun by slop will quickly lose its customers, and with them any developers offering actual games.
Once the ball starts rolling it’ll become a vicious cycle, and once enough developers and customers have left there’ll be no coming back. And it certainly looks like the ball is picking up speed.
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.
It’ll become less of a problem when they charge full price for tokens
Local models are really good already
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
Honestly if we can just prioritize giving real developers a spotlight to be seen and heard, sorting specifically by no-ai and having awards and events for no-ai, then I could see this being a potentially good thing. The low effort game devs of the past will all naturally sort themselves into slopper categories and out of the market.
The only problem is that perhaps not enough consumers are competent enough to care if a product is slop.
Part of the issue with this approach is that you essentially get to something like a karma system, where well known developers are pushed to the top.
This is something Valve just spent a lot of time and effort to undo, so small, new indie devs get as much storefront space as the veterans.
Valve really are the good guys huh
60/40 honestly.
Is everything that isn’t their own games? They do fantastically being fair about.
They’re more than happy to casino it up with their own s*** though.
No one’s perfect
for me, step one is allowing me to block from sight, ANYTHING a by a supposed AAA developer. I do NOT want to see anything from ea, ubisoft, etc when searching for games.
another would be, if the game is early access and has 30 DLCs… I never want to see that companies ‘products’ again.
and honestly, that’s it for me. Idgaf about ai slop of clone games (yet), good chance they are still individuals doing it and not some massive corporation.
I will always support the smaller teams whenever possible… I never want to see anything from rockstar, Ubisoft or whatever… all trash
Good news, you can already do that
Just made a lot of people’s day
Doesn’t work. I tried that with paradox, but still keep seeing their games. I’m not sure what exactly it blocks, but it’s not games from search results.
It removes them from all the suggestion places like the discovery queue and front page. For search results IIRC you have to ignore individual titles, and set your steam search settings to default to “hide ignored items”.
I see. Sad that it’s so toothless as currently implemented.
Well. The real problem is that there’s no way to definitively detect AI. And slop scammers are certainly not going to volunteer that information.
Slopping asset flip and cash grab games have always been a problem. That’s nothing new. AI just made it easier to do.
This is a problem that’s existed for 20 years basically. AI has only just made it more of a problem. It’s not new.
If we could have solved this problem we already would have.
AI disclosure at a minimum I agree with wholeheartedly.
But basically every other solution everyone is throwing around is more or less just f****** stupid. Someone who legitimately makes a game for themselves. That is actually fun because they made it for the purpose of them themselves playing it. Even if they used nothing but AI is still probably going to be a better game than some half-assed cash grab or asset flip made by a legitimate human with no AI.
The problem isn’t AI. The problem is s***** people making s***** games with no integrity or intent to play their own creation.
If you want a fun game, you have to make a game you would play. How you enforce that is f****** beyond me though.
Why the fuck do you fucking censor stupid shit on the fucking internet?
You know you can swear in this goddamned place right?
I think a lot of them will in fact volunteer that information, and there is definitely a definitive way to detect AI: ask the developers to show their work. Images have layers, 3D assets can be demonstrated. Code is only slightly more ambiguous. On top of all of that, there is an obvious quality difference.
I remember a thread on here a month ago or something where the developers just asked the A.I. to generate some convincing looking work to show. Like layers and stuff as you say. It was truly shameless
Was that the Agent Pond game with the cybercows? Not convincing at all, and also not a work file like psd, xcf, or clip, but yeah they tried.
I think a lot of them will in fact volunteer that information
LOOOOOLOLOL
ask the developers to show their work
Nothing about that is definitive. And Valve isn’t going to review it anyway.
Nobody is doing schoolwork to sell a game. What an asinine take. Valve also isnt going to pay people to go through all that code.
huh?
I was agreeing with you. Nobody is going to pay anybody to pour through every one of the 10k or so games that get released everyday. Its a costly practice for little reward from their point of view
Oh yeah absolutely. Gabe needs his yachts.
They probably meant to respond to me or something.
Sloppers think it’s the future, most of them have no idea how hated they are. Their shitbots tell them “AI assisted tools allow you to do more, better, faster” and not “yeah boss everyone will hate everything we make”.
How is asking them to prove they did or can do work that they didn’t and couldn’t do not definitive proof?
They better have a Slopless Award for the next steam awards
