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Valve admits Steam has an 'AI slop' and cloning problem but says it won't police which tools developers use
Valve's Steam team acknowledged in an interview at Steam Indie Connect in South Korea that low-quality and cloned games, many built with AI tools, are flooding the store, especially during Next Fest. It will not restrict tools and plans better discovery instead. No new rule was announced.
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Valve has acknowledged that Steam has a problem with low-quality, AI-built and cloned games, but says it does not plan to limit which tools developers can use. The comments came from Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson of Valve's Steam business team, who spoke to a gaming outlet at Steam Indie Connect in South Korea; the interview was published on 28 October. No new rule or anti-cloning tool was announced.
Giardino said Valve does not want to be a gatekeeper that tells developers which tools they should or should not use. He said clones have always been an issue on the platform and that AI has sped the problem up. His advice to developers was to make sure a game does not rely on a single copyable mechanic and has a perspective of its own.
Wilkinson said Valve is 'fully aware of this situation' and that a significant number of people at the company are thinking about how to solve it. Valve's stated goal is to improve the storefront and its systems rather than restrict access based on the tools used. Valve changed its content rules in January 2024 so that most games using generative AI can be released on the store.
Wilkinson said the crowding is worse during the first few days of Next Fest, before more personalised recommendations take effect. The event is now much bigger than before, which makes it harder to track every game. Valve has made discovery more random in those early days to stop developers abusing visibility, and Wilkinson accepted the cost: some low-quality games get exposed. 'We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed,' he said.
Other coverage of the interview reports that Valve treats attempts to extort developers with AI clones as a police matter rather than a platform one. That point was not in every report of the interview.
The problem is not limited to Valve's store. Itch.io has reported that the number of new game pages created per day has roughly doubled in the past two months, and AI-generated games are the likely reason. Valve has pointed to better recommendations as its answer, so players are likely to see changes in what Steam surfaces before any change in what developers may submit.
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