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.
They better have a Slopless Award for the next steam awards
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.
Gateway proprietor doesn’t want to gatekeep
- 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?
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.
Valve, have you learned nothing from Steam Greenlight and why that had to be taken down?
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.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.”
Not every game needs a fuckload of features. Not everyone has the time and skill to create and manage a community around their own game.
Steam could at least allow people to vote on whether some games are complete clone garbage or not, have the weight of the vote rely on the account level + age. Or let people indicate the original game on a clone’s page. Like any community feature, I can see this being a vector for abuse, but this AI bullshit is absolutely ruining online trust
online trust
when has this ever been a thing?
Solid win for those of you who like to wade through 200 AI slop titles before finding something good.
I think the problem with a ban is that the creators of AI slop will stop disclosing or tagging it.
Allowing it with tags + letting users filter it out might be the best way to reduce it?
And before that, wading through 200 asset flipping games before finding something good.
Ironpineapple’s job gonna be very interesting for the next few years.
I’ll take slop by 1 person, over AAA garbage any day
One of the issues will be server space, I imagine. Where these agents are at right meow means a whole bunch of people can dump slop games at a rate we’ve never imagined.
I think they’ll have to find a way to weed out a lot and stay ahead of this.
A simple tag for users is nice bc some don’t want any part of it but it would also be a nice heads up for everyone.
Okay. Gatekeeping sucks. I’m with ya there. But… that doesn’t mean that you can’t make “no ai” (or something) a simple user setting, right? Does something like this already exist? If not, why? (I don’t use Steam, so I genuinely don’t know).
Steam should add a $150k game listing surcharge so there’s no market for crapware.
That would kill literally all indie games
Wrong take…
