Valve has acknowledged that Steam is struggling with a wave of low quality AI games and copycat releases, but the company has made it clear it has no plans to start policing which tools developers are allowed to use. The comments came during a question and answer session with Korean developers at Steam Indie Connect in Busan on Tuesday, as reported by Inven Global.
Two members of the Steam business team, Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson, fielded the questions at the event, which Valve co-hosted with the Busan Indie Connect Festival organisers and the Korea Creative Content Agency.
Extortion threats and AI clones
One developer told the pair that indie studios have been receiving emails demanding payment, with the threat that their game would otherwise be copied using AI and put on sale first. Giardino said it was the first he had heard of such cases and described extortion as a matter for the police rather than a storefront, although he added that Valve would look into any reports it receives.
On AI itself, his position was blunt: “We don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use.” He argued that cloning existed long before generative tools arrived and that AI has simply sped the process up. His advice to developers was to build a community, earn the trust of players and keep improving their game after release, so that the original remains the version people want. Valve takes a similar view of piracy, he said, preferring to make the legitimate product the best one rather than leaning hard on DRM.
Next Fest and the first 48 hours
Another developer raised the flood of low effort entries in the most recent Steam Next Fest, which Valve itself promoted as offering “thousands (literally) of demos”. Wilkinson explained that games are shown to players more or less at random for the opening two days of the festival, and only after that does Steam switch to personalised recommendations. The random start is there to give every entry a fair go and to stop studios entering early to grab visibility.
“We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed,” Wilkinson said, according to VGC’s write-up of the session. “We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem.”
Giardino pointed out that the complaints are familiar. When Steam Greenlight launched around 14 years ago, developers asked for a way to filter its games out, and the same request surfaced again when Steam Direct replaced it. Each time, he said, Valve chose to improve the store rather than restrict who could publish on it.
Not everyone is convinced
The answers have drawn criticism. Eurogamer argued that telling small studios to build communities does little for games that never get noticed in the first place, and noted it has asked Valve for clarification because the remarks reached English readers through translation. The case of Needle in a Haystack Simulator, an unreleased indie game copied so many times that the original is hard to find, has become a shorthand for the problem.
We looked at how AI could disrupt video gaming a few years ago, and the storefront side of that shift is now arriving fast. For the moment, Valve’s message is that discovery tools will carry the load, while the decision on using AI stays with developers.
