Valve's no-gatekeeping stance on AI tools is fine, but it can't stop there

Valve said at a developer event in Korea that Steam has a problem with AI-made low-quality games and AI clones, and also that it won’t dictate which tools developers use. PC Gamer’s report of the Q&A quotes Steam business team member Tom Giardino saying, “We don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use.”¹ I think that is the right line to draw, and a wholly insufficient place to stop.

Here is my argument in one sentence: Valve is right not to judge how a game is made, but it owes developers real work on how a game is found and who gets credit for it.

Start with the case for Valve’s position, which deserves its due. A rule against certain tools sounds simple until someone has to enforce it. Where does “made with AI” end? Valve’s own people point out that clones existed long before generative AI and that the tools have only sped them up.² A tool ban would sweep in honest developers using assistive software, while bad actors would simply stop disclosing. Giardino also said the aim has never been to filter out bad games but to lift good ones, and that the same complaints followed Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct.³ That history is worth respecting.

But the history also cuts the other way, because the problem now has a different shape. Developers describe being scared to show early footage or demos at all. One studio held back a public Next Fest demo over fears it would be copied before launch, and Lucas Pope said he talks less about his work in progress.⁴ Valve’s advice in reply was to build a community and add features, personality and creativity that come from your own perspective.⁵ That is good design counsel, but it is not a platform policy. As Eurogamer asks, how does a developer build trust and an audience if copies bury the original before it finds one?⁵

The discovery answer was thinner still. Marc Wilkinson explained that Steam Next Fest shows games at random for the first two days before personal recommendations begin, a deliberate choice to give every developer a fair share and prevent gaming of the system. He conceded the trade-off: “some low-quality games get exposed.”³ That is an honest admission, and it also means the platform has knowingly built a front door that favors volume. IGN notes that roughly 17% of last year’s Next Fest demos disclosed generative AI use, with more than 8,000 demos this year.² A random lottery with that many entrants is a hard place to be noticed.

So here is what developers and players should expect: no tool bans, and for now, no promised fix. Valve says a significant number of people are working on discoverability, and that it will look into extortion reports, though it called those a matter for law enforcement.³ Valve has said it recognizes the trade-off, and Giardino says it places weight on making the original version easier to find than its copies.³ That is a stated intention, not a feature anyone can use today.

What would change my view? If Valve ships changes that surface original work ahead of copies, and developers report that cloned games stop outranking the games they copied, I will gladly say the hands-off stance worked. If a year from now the answer is still “make your game harder to copy,” I will say the stance was only a way to avoid the work.

Valve doesn’t have to choose the tools. It does have to choose the winners.

Our read: This is opinion, built on one Q&A reported by Inven and relayed by several outlets. Valve has named the problem; what matters now is whether the store changes.

Footnotes

1. PC Gamer, “Valve admits Steam has an AI slop and cloning problem, but says ‘we don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use’”. Retrieved October 28, 2026. ↩

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

3. VGC, “Valve has ‘a significant number’ working on Steam’s visibility dilemma but says it won’t gatekeep games made with AI”. Retrieved October 28, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

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

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