Valve says it is working on Steam's AI slop. Developers are still on their own

At a developer event in Korea this week, Valve’s Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson said “a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem” on Steam, and that Valve is “fully aware of the situation.” ¹ The same session, as Kotaku and Eurogamer both read it, handed most of the homework to the developers being copied. ²³

My argument is simple: awareness is not a plan, and it is not enough for players or for honest developers until Valve shows something it will actually do.

Here is the best case for Valve, and it is a fair one. Giardino said clone games existed before generative AI, and that Valve does not want to be a gatekeeper dictating which tools developers use. ²¹ Wilkinson explained that the first two days of Next Fest show demos at random, so developers cannot game the algorithm, and that personalized recommendations take over afterward. He said much of the coverage of low-quality games was based on those first days. ²¹ The trade-off, he admitted, is that some low-quality games get exposed. A store that bans by tool invites endless disputes, and Valve has been burned before when it swept too widely: Eurogamer recalls the sweeping move against adult games. ³ That caution is not irrational.

But look at what the advice amounts to. Giardino’s answer to the cloning problem was to build a community and keep adding features and personality, rather than lean on a single mechanic someone can copy. ²¹ That is decent craft advice. It is not a store policy. And it assumes a developer has the time, money and audience to keep improving a game while knockoffs compete for the same shoppers.

The damage is already visible. Developers are holding back demos for fear of being cloned before launch: Alliance Arts delayed a Next Fest demo, citing concern that AI tools could replicate its game before release. ⁴ Eurogamer points to Needle in a Haystack Simulator, an unreleased indie game copied so often that it is hard to tell which one is the original. ³ As Eurogamer asks, how do you build a community if you never get the chance to find an audience? ³

On the ransom threats, Giardino said it was the first he had heard of them and that this sounded like a matter for law enforcement, though Valve would help where it can. ²³ That is a reasonable answer to extortion itself. It is a thin answer to the store full of copies sitting beside the originals.

So what would change my view? Three things, all concrete. First, a stated way for a developer to report a clone and a stated window in which Valve responds. Second, some change to how Next Fest’s random period surfaces games, since Valve itself concedes low-quality titles get exposed there. Third, a progress report, even a modest one, that tells us what those people are doing. None of these require banning a single tool.

Our read: Valve’s stance on tools may be defensible, but “we’re thinking about it” has a shelf life, and the people paying for the wait are the developers and the players hunting for their games. Show one policy, and I will gladly say so.

A store can decline to be a gatekeeper. It cannot decline to be a store.

The account of the Korea session rests on second-hand reports of the talk, and Eurogamer says it has asked Valve for clarification. ³

Footnotes

1. IGN, “Valve Responds to Steam AI Slop Deluge Complaints”. Retrieved October 28, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Kotaku, “Valve Knows Steam Has An AI Slop Problem And Has A ‘Significant Number Of People’ Working On It”. Retrieved October 28, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Eurogamer, “Valve addresses Steam’s AI game cloning problem - by suggesting developers make their games less copyable”. Retrieved October 28, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. Ars Technica, “AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work”. Retrieved October 28, 2026. ↩