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.

Solid win for those of you who like to wade through 200 AI slop titles before finding something good.

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

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

I'll take slop by 1 person, over AAA garbage any day

Wrong take...

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).

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.

Ironpineapple's job gonna be very interesting for the next few years.

Good news, you can already do that

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.

1. Require AI tool disclosure
2. Enforce that. Spot check.
3. 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?

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.

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.

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.

huh?

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 probably meant to respond to me or something.

Valve, have you learned nothing from Steam Greenlight and why that had to be taken down?

And before that, wading through 200 asset flipping games before finding something good.

online trust

when has this ever been a thing?

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

Valve really are the good guys huh

Oh yeah absolutely. Gabe needs his yachts.

Steam should add a $150k game listing surcharge so there’s no market for crapware.

When you say cloning are you meaning like how there's now 200 different versions of lethal company on steam now?

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.

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.

Gateway proprietor doesn't want to gatekeep

They better have a Slopless Award for the next steam awards

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?

That would kill literally all indie games

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.

Gateway

🐮📦

They can tell them to let us gatekeep. Ai needs to be labeled.

Just made a lot of people's day

I don't speak hieroglyphic

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.

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.

Before the AI age it took some time and effort to make an asset flip so they were relatively few and far between. IE you could usually trust a game on Steam wasn't a slop clone

Try 10000 slop by 500 people

so, let the market kill them then. dont buy the stuff and if you do, refund and delete

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.

No need to be gatekeepers, just let me blacklist entire genres, publishers and studios.

You can. Add tags/genres to your ignored list, and you won't see any games marked with them.

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.

As far as I can tell, you can only add about 10 tags to the ignore list. That's way too few for me.

The problem with that is that the person who slops out 50 broken shitty games is not going to disclose that they used AI, and the one man band who put genuine craft into their game but used a little bit of AI in the coding or textures will disclose it, so you have the opposite of what you want from the AI filter.

That's the entire fucking problem: the market CAN'T kill them because they cost nothing to make.