Dear Steam,
Please put a filter tool in so that we, the player, can choose to filter out AI slop.
Thank you.
I think we’re reaching a point where there is going to be so much stuff around be it games, tv, movies, music, etc all made by AI and all just garbage, that it will make curating a huge deal. Like we’ll need to have services whose sole purpose is to sift through the marketplaces and find quality stuff to then present to people. So you’ll have a two tiered system where on one hand you can browse “everything” and it’s just a deluge of stuff and then on the other hand you can go to a curated marketplace that only lists stuff that is known to be high quality. But it’s going to take time for those curated places to pop up, and in the mean time we are gonna be swimming in slop.
Like in the pre-search-engine internet you would have indexes, or whatever they were called, listing useful websites.
Yikes. On the one hand, curated lists sound like a breath of fresh air right now. On the other, that’s AI setting us back 30 years.
My search engine even labels AI slop websites, that it pulls from open-source lists like https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist. So yeah every day I feel like the need for curated lists is getting stronger even for “useful websites”. Too much noise these days.
Pretty much this. I am reminded of when reality TV first came up, it was thought that it would be a passing fad lasting maybe a year or two. People get exited by it at first, then get bored of it craving something with more substance. It never happened. Turns out the slop machine hit a level good enough that many would lap it up. Survivor is going into it 51st season right now.
But while this stuff can be produced (be it text, TV, software), you can curate it. Those curated lists will become the new social treasure like how some movie critics could become minor celebrities in themselves. Yeah there will be AI bots trying to do that as well, but if they fall flat, so to will their respect.
Neal Stephenson explores these ideas in a few of his books. Basically that there is so much false information online that the biggest advantage you can have is good software for sifting through it.
So basically the current steam curators system but you have to pay to see what they curate. And valve wins again
Well I think there could also be a place for like niche curators. Like a blog that goes and finds all the strategy games that are actually good and posts reviews of them. If your a fan of that type of game you follow them, they try all the shitty ones so you don’t have to, and point you to the good ones. Same with other niche things.
That is a built in feature in steam
Hey Valve, could you use AI to port all of your own old Intel versions of Mac games to Apple Silicon?
I can’t believe the sentiment in the comments here.
…Y’all think spammers are going to label themselves as “AI generated” if that’s detrimental? They will not, and it’s not something that can be objectively detected.
Getting customers to moderate this is self defeating, as the whole point of spam is to get in front of buyers’ eyeballs.
Valve needs to hire staff to cull this junk, they can afford to, but they don’t want to. That’s the crux of the issue.
There’s also a practical element, where Steam is not in a position to vet every game and developer. They could have the community do it, but that then opens up a whole bunch of abuse risks.
There’s also an argument that it wouldn’t stop some of the issues in the article. Where do you draw the line with asset flip, or AI generated? If the developer used AI to make placeholders in the early access of a game, and then swapped it with removed it later on, is the game still AI generated? What if they used assets that were unknowingly AI generated, like stock sound effects?
Or if someone is ESL and used a translator that turned out to be AI powered/they just write with a similar style.
It also won’t stop people doing it.maliciously. if you’re threatening to clone someone’s game off a demo, and release it before they do, you’re probably not going to stop because you need to put a little “AI generated” flag on your game, if the rest of it didn’t stop you.
Well, I’m not advocating for LLM assisted game development to be banned, or those with a but if diffusion. That’s what the tag is supposed to be for.
I’m strictly talking spam and clones. Clearly dysfunctional games, misleadingly advertised.
Valve makes $billions in revenue every year. If they make 30% off every developer’s sales, I think they can afford to apply some basic vetting to each one.
Indeed, cloners will find ways to flood the market, because that’s the effective way.
As someone who likes to discuss about solutions, time is something the cloners do not have. They are always trying to clone the currently trending things, so they cannot wait for three months or so for the trend to die out.
I would say a mandatory 3 month period of closed beta would help cull many bad actors, with strict requirements as what would suffice. Valve could in the meanwhile scan in case the assets are stolen from another games listed in their store.
Assets can be packed or otherwise obfuscated in all sorts of ways.
I’m less certain about the “3 month forced waiting period” thing… it sounds like a good idea on the surface, but I just wonder how it might affect small devs. Also, some spammers would still immediately schedule a listing for a clone and then vibecode it over the three months.
The 3 months won’t hurt developers. The time flies when you’re actually developing the game or managing Valve bureaucracy. :D
I didn’t really go to specifics in my previous comment. That would require making assumptions and make the comment too long to read. I’m sure you have an assumption as to why the idea would hurt indie developers. I’m happy just making a surface level assumption about using time to our advantage.
That might be true but it still seems like it might significantly hampers the trend chasing clone effect. Its not stopping the cloners from making the clones but throwing them off of the trend rhythm and making the clone less able to skim money from people. A legit dev will likely have to take into account the waiting period but that can just be part of their dev cycle now. Or maybe if your studio is partnered with an already established publisher, you can just release the game no waiting. I know that sucks for fully independent devs but there are extremely indie friendly publishers out there like Devolver Digital.
The 3 month period is not really effective if you can avoid it in any way. Which is why it needs to be strict, like not using a publisher to speed it up, but having the 3 month period for each different game. And that replaceable placeholders do not count for the 3 months by strictly requiring the game to have something that would reset the timer, like changing the genre tags or the name of the game.
I’d be behind spot-checking at the very least. I feel like Valve is trustworthy enough that most devs should be able to open-source their code to Valve.
If you get caught, you get perma-banned from Steam.
Then put a little thingie showing how many years a dev has existed (so people can put their AI-detector thinking caps on when they see a dev that’s existed for 3 months putting out a fully polished game).
With all due respect, this is exactly what I am talking about.
I feel like Valve is trustworthy enough that most devs should be able to open-source their code to Valve.
Enforcing posting code source isn’t viable for many reasons. But one is that spammers are going to hide the vibecoding anyway; this would only catch relatively innocent coding assistants from earnest devs.
It wouldn’t catch anything malicious.
Then put a little thingie showing how many years a dev has existed (so people can put their AI-detector thinking caps on when they see a dev that’s existed for 3 months putting out a fully polished game).
And again, the point of spamming is to get eyeballs in front of customers. It doesn’t matter if 99% reject it as obvious garbage; if just a few people buy it on chance, it’s worth the minimal effort for the spammer, and it encourages other spammers to come.
…And that would be catastrophic to new devs, anyway. How is anyone new supposed to enter the space and publish their labor of love if everyone assumes new devs are malicious?
Sorry if this comes off as thorny, I feel like commenters here are contorting themselves to excuse a giant corporation.
This is Valve’s storefront. They make mountains of cash from it.
It is their job to filter spam, they need to spend money to do it, and they don’t want to. There is no way around it.
It’s not thorny to me, but then I’m used to polite disagreement where I’ve found many would turn hostile, so perhaps your padding at the end was a good plan - even if not necessary for me personally.
You raise good points, but it’s one of those “Don’t let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good” things. No system can catch 100% of these problems that you correctly point out. At least, none that I can imagine nor that you propose.
Right now, Valve is the “best” video game distributor - apart from maybe GoG. I hope GoG dethrones them as the only reasons Valve is “better” are Linux support and market dominance (ergo convenience), and perhaps the AI craze will be the wedge issue that GoG takes a firm stance against, at which point they’d be in a good spot to take over.
Unfortunately, I strongly suspect the vast majority of consumers simply do not care if a game was developed with AI.
All that to say: I agree they should be doing more, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Right now, Valve is the “best” video game distributor - apart from maybe GoG. I hope GoG dethrones them as the only reasons Valve is “better” are Linux support and market dominance (ergo convenience), and perhaps the AI craze will be the wedge issue that GoG takes a firm stance against, at which point they’d be in a good spot to take over.
Again, I emphasize: you are talking about this as if picking a team.
These are storefronts, run by corporations. I don’t care if Valve is percieved as “good” or not, I care about the current and future transactional services they will offer me, and how they will affect the market as a whole.
And this is bad. Its toxic for game devs, bad for me as a shopper, and unhealthy for the future of gaming.
Vavle do not deserve excuses and hand-waving just because one thinks they are a ‘lesser evil’ in some other context; every service should get criticized a-la-carte. They are not people, they do not get passes.
The mindset of loyalty and “thrones” and “who is nicer” is exactly the sort of anthropomorphic mindset they want you in. Its the goal of advertising. They want you loyal to their storefront, so at some point, it becomes an irrational factor that influences your shopping choices… Hence this comment section.
All that to say: I agree they should be doing more, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Indeed.
But I’m not going to apologize for Valve in the same breath eather, and I am appaled so many commenters here are. They would be skewering them if this was some other strorefront doing the exact same thing.
Again, I emphasize: you are talking about this as if picking a team.
Yeah, I mean, gotta buy video games from someone. Valve’s one of the least shitty corporations by far, so they get my money.
Vavle do not deserve excuses and hand-waving just because one thinks they are a ‘lesser evil’ in some other context; every service should get criticized a-la-carte.
Why don’t you think I’m open to a-la-carte criticism? I’ve expressed plainly that it’s valid. Do you want me to fight you about it or something?
They are not people, they do not get passes.
I would say people don’t get passes either; I could quote Stannis the Mannis, but I won’t.
But I’m not going to apologize for Valve in the same breath eather, and I am appaled so many commenters here are.
Are you ranting with me or at me here? I never “apologized” for them.
Enforce an AI label, abusers get delisted and not allowed to be on steam for 3-5 years. Allow users to block AI labeled games.
Edit: I think the ban should affect the developer and publisher too. That way the publisher makes efforts to prevent release of slop too.
100% this.
if using AI in your product adds so much value to your product, then why are you hiding it??
This is the exact same attitude they had to the deluge of unity store asset flips (well they actually tried to blame unity for that, but I digress)
Steam gets their money either way.
And that’s what Lord GabeN needs to buy another super yacht for himself, and more Aston Martins for his son to race.
I am starting to think that having hard technical or imposed market limits might be a good thing, or at least the lesser of two evils.
It you had to build a game on before the era of cheap middleware engines, there was a natural barrier to entry. The Nintendo seal of approval used to mean something at least even if the game was still trash.
But now, you can flood the space with minimal barrier to entry and we are being flooded with junk. But those that control the access and making big money off this so they turn a blind eye.
A few months back, there was a reddit post for my local town, it was about self publishing their new game on Steam. Anyway, about a dozen others posted links to their projects all releasing within the next few months, all of them copies or low effort projects. This is a single town, in a single country, that is releasing potentially dozens, possible hundreds of games a year. The market is flooded because we have made it so easy to pump this junk out and there is little interest in putting even vague restrictions on it.
The crash is coming and we will all know why it happened.
It’s been coming for a long time. Steam always had a slop problem since the greenlight days.
The reason so much shit got onto the platform was by exploiting the trading card system, and Valve allowed it.
Eventually Valve realised they could get more money by just skipping the vote, and allowing people to just pay to get their games on the platform.
Pretty much. They already had this tendency, it is just accelerating and now the technology has kicked it into turbo.
is ai a tool or a crutch?
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.
Been blocking EA games for years.
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.
Valve should have staff manually play through 144k games to make sure all the tags are accurate?
Yes, they can afford to ensure the quality of their systems.
What you’re asking for is not trivial. Just for the backlog, assuming a single scant hour per game, is 70 new full-time positions before getting into the organizational and administrative overhead. That’s the absolute bare minimum to load up and investigate a game and categorize it and it only works for things that are clearly defined from the very beginning. Realistically there’s no way they can sift through all the assets and code in that time for, as an example, signs of AI use even if they had full access to the developer’s work files. What you’re asking for is more like a full week audit on average.
I’m pretty sure they can afford it. But I’d be happy for the tag system to continue being meaningless if they would just hoist genre out into a separate system curated only by Valve.
As far as I can tell, you can only add about 10 tags to the ignore list. That’s way too few for me.
Walmart sells a ton of shit I think is stupid. Sometimes I see it in the store. It really doesn’t bother me, I go to the aisle for what I want, consider the options, pick one and buy it.
I’m staunchly against smoking. Cigarettes are sold in many stores, but the packs all have warning labels on them making it very easy for me to make sure I never accidentally buy cigarettes. So far, it’s been pretty easy to avoid.
I don’t need to talk to the clerk when I walk in and ask them to hide all the products I hate, as long as everything is labeled and I can buy what I intend to buy, it’s really not a problem. It’s a store.
That’s not the issue here. They are free to have whatever games they want in the store, I don’t care.
The issue is: if you have a recommendation system in place (like the Discovery Queue, which I use and have found great games on), you’d better let me customize it so I don’t recommended yet another hentai puzzle instead of a nice boomer shooter. Just this. I just want some control on what I’m being recommended.
Account settings > Store preferences > uncheck “Adult Only Sexual Content”
Thanks, but it only solves part of the issue.
That hurts Valve’s bottom line.
Never going to happen
It’s not unheard of Valve going things that hurt its’ bottom line.
Family sharing, for instance. I can use the same instance of The Talos Principle 2 that my kid uses instead having two copies.
That kind of touch makes me a happy customer, with way too many games on my “one day I’ll play this” list.
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They can tell them to let us gatekeep. Ai needs to be labeled.
This is like the Wii shovelware era on steroids.
I just want a sequel to The Guy Game so I pair it up with its brother I have on this very real shelf I have that holds this also very real physical copy of this game I have amongst other games like Donkey Kong Country 1+2+3, Rollercoaster Tycoon, 1+2, Goldeneye n Perfect Dark, and Myst n Riven. Shame they didn’t make more games in the Myst series. Could have been a great series of, I dunno, five or so games and a book series, but they stopped making them after the second installment as my definitely not self-neuralized brain is telling me. The books were good though. But what were we talking about? Nine-tenths of the law? Tf does that shit mean? Bueller?
Gateway proprietor doesn’t want to gatekeep
Gateway
🐮📦
I don’t speak hieroglyphic
Kind of a sick burn seeing as that emoji combo relates to a defunct computer manufacturing company and is a suitable age gate for people born after 2000
so, let the market kill them then. dont buy the stuff and if you do, refund and delete
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
