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.
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.
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
Rotten Tomatoes -> Bots and Tomatoes. Is it AI slop or hot?
Hot or Bot
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.
You’re going to see the media organic content labels, just like groceries have “regular” and “organic”. There’s demand for such a certification so it wouldn’t surprise me to see that in the near future.
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.
Solid win for those of you who like to wade through 200 AI slop titles before finding something good.
I’ll take slop by 1 person, over AAA garbage any day
Try 10000 slop by 500 people
still better then AAA nonsense in my eyes.
Honestly, the few times I’ve come across a good slop game. Day have been some of the best little indie games I’ve ever played.
AI has giving people who can design a good game. The ability to now also make those games by themselves.
Not everyone can be toby fox and do everything sadly.
The problem is those few games are made by people who made those games for themselves because they wanted to play them. Then they decided to share them but first and foremost they were still for the author.
Hey guys, just made it way too easy to put out s*** that you don’t want to play yourself in an attempt to make a quick buck. To share that’s always been a problem but it’s just gotten worse.
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 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?
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).
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.
- 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?
Steam already has the first two, and I’m pretty sure it has the third because it’s illegal. It’s just a matter of effort and volume. So many generated games can be put on Steam that it’s almost impossible to keep up. If they don’t disclose generative AI usage then it takes time to discover, and that time can steal the spotlight from the legitimate games.
In what world would adding a UI filter to hide games that use AI would it be illegal? Cite a law. Explain why all the other filters are not?
I think you misread what I wrote. It’s already illegal to steal someone’s work. If you’re making a game and releases a demo and then someone copies it, that’s copyright infringement. It’s not a rule that Valve needs to add because it’s an implicit rule because it’s illegal.
Ah, so not the “first two” as in bullet points 1 and 2 in my list.
So, a few things here:
- Some things are covered by trademark. This can vary by jurisdiction
- Some things are covered by copyright. Also, this varies by jurisdiction
- Properly going through all the paperwork first is the safest, requires time and money, only applies in relevant jurisdictions, and requires time and effort again to enforce for only what it covers.
- Assuming the creator has the time and effort to go through 3 (if not, some stuff is arguably prior art but requires more time and money to prove), they have to be aware that anyone has created a clone of their work that would, at least in that jurisdiction, infringe.
- After they have found it, they need to contact valve and whomever else.
- If they’re not happy stopping there, then there’s the whole legal process (costing more time and money)
Edit: this is also not even the exhaustive version of the list.
Yes, that’s why my first comment talks about effort, compared to the amount of slop that can be made. You aren’t allowed to steal people’s work, and you’re also required to tag if your game uses gen-AI. It’s just prohibitive to keep up with all of it now.
The legal process though is a formal requirement to sue them. Valve doesn’t need to go through that. They could (and I think do) have a system for developers to claim that a game has stolen its work and request for it to be taken down. You don’t need to go to court for a private company to enforce that. It’s just that, again, it’s impossible to keep up with it now. It’s too easy to create a clone so, even if it’s taken down, another one can appear in its place trivially.
. They could (and I think do) have a system for developers to claim that a game has stolen its work and request for it to be taken down.
I agree with this. Something like community notes on other social media might help on identification and alerting other users, but making sure that’s not gamed by bots and the like is a separate issue.
Yeah out of 100 vibe coded games. Iv come across like 3 that were legitimately good.
Those three where actually very very good games But they were tiny little things clearly made because the guy who made them WANTED to play them.
While the rest where just asset flips or clearly just attempting to make a cheap quick buck.
It’s just a great example of the problem. AI by itself doesn’t cause an issue. We already had this problem. Asset flips low-called a crash grabs have always been a thing.
Problem AI caused is now it’s a thousand times easier for literally every lazy f*** to do this.
Banning AI games should not happen. It is possible to make something legitimately fun and worthwhile playing with nothing but AI.
We need to solve the fact that every d****** can just s*** onto the steam store with no effort and leave something half built and abandoned.
Disclosure at a minimum. Better filtering harsher vote waiting.
My problem is every other idea I can think of unfairly smacks legitimate AI games or legitimate games that use AI as an actual proper tool as opposed to just a lazy way to asset flip.
Is not a lot of good ways to do this. To be fair, if there were we wouldn’t have asset flips in low quality cash crabs either.
People were mad at the Steam Greenlight system, so when Valve listened and opened the doors to pre-AI slop, then they started whining about their games being buried in a sea of shit. I can’t blame Valve for taking a cautious approach.
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.
I played some of them. They very different to be blatant clones. Just cloned idea
Makes sense a .ml user is dumb enough to play several clones of a viral meme game.
Oh damn wow
Valve may just have to grit their teeth and actually hire people to do community work 😞 RIP. Where will they get the money??
Wrong take…
Valve, have you learned nothing from Steam Greenlight and why that had to be taken down?
Steam should add a $150k game listing surcharge so there’s no market for crapware.
That would kill literally all indie games
A lot of crapware coming from large AAA devs these days and a lot of good games from small-time devs who put all their life’s savings into starting their little indie studio… Which one do you think could better afford the 150k surcharge, Ubisoft listing yet another 5 Assasin’s Creed titles or, say, ConcernedApe releasing Stardew Valley for the first time back in 2014 or whenever?
And more expensive games (who do you think will pay the 150K in the end ?) and a goodbye to Indie studio or solo developers.
Doesn’t have to be $150k, could be $100
A way less extreme fee was once proposed for steam greenlight, the process that was once supposed to filter new games released on Steam.
Principle was the game studio would present their game (in various states of completion) with a video, a couple screenshots and a blurb, maybe a demo (rare) and Steam users would check their page and vote on them if they wanted it on Steam.
For lots of reasons, it didn’t work. Like now, one problem was that no barrier to entry meant anyone could half-ass a page for their asset-flip or even other people’s work, eclipsing real games that had a hard time being approved (even a few that had a reasonable following outside Steam already).
At some point Steam tried going the fee-to-entry route, even making it a payment to charity so they were not accused of making money from the situation. It was way less than 150k, and it was already seen as rather unfair. Especially for people living in countries where the average wage was lower than in the US.
Geeenlight finally imploded because it made nobody happy, and we ended up with the current situation of “anything goes, and the algorithm will recognize real games over the crap”. It’s always been a shit show, and it only became worse with genAI slop.
Regarding the fee you proposed, something that high would make it basically impossible for an indie to get in there without a publisher deal, and even then would make their relationship to said publishers even more one-way, if by chance they get one to absorb the risk. Have you read about small studios being conned out of their work by their publishers? Prepare for more.
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
It also gatekeeps non-Americans, I assume; I had to puzzle out the meaning and while the name Gateway does ring a bell (I probably saw it on some ad or CRT monitor at some point) I’d have never associated it with the cow and box emojis. 🤷♂️
I’m glad we’re all having fun, but I just don’t have time for people who won’t say what they mean right now. It’s exhausting!
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.
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.
They better have a Slopless Award for the next steam awards
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.
I don’t think many people here actually read the article, valve said they immediately noticee the takeover of slop during the next fest and have already committed a significant amount of their team to tackling this. All they said was ATM there is no stance/solution. They also mentioned that games with real effort put in will be prioritized.
They aren’t letting slop roll them over lol
They aren’t letting slop roll over them
And yet it rolls.
That’s corporate speak for “seen ✅”. I know people love Valve, but this is very standard playbook for how they operate in PR. Acknowledge the problem, say they are working on it, maybe in a year or 2 we get a nugget of an attempt to kinda poke at the problem.
Maybe Valve will prove me wrong here since this is ramping up quickly, but this also isn’t anything that will threaten their monopoly in short order. If I was GOG, I’d be taking a hard anti-AI stance between Valve’s timid response and Tim Sweeney’s full on cannonball and reinforce what they already do in curating for handcrafted games.
—–
And I don’t think the rest of their statement is promising. First part (the title) is irrelevant: you don’t need to gatekeep tools to gatekeep obvious slop copies of games already announced and upcoming on your platform. Let along a bare quality window. Valve did that gatekeeping for the first 60% of its life. Maybe we need that back.
Second part is borderline tonedeaf :
Noting that games were being cloned long before AI came on the scene—just at a much slower pace—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.”
So, “yeah just market more and work harder”. The two expensive parts of making a game. From a billion dollar corporation. If any other AAA studio said this it’d be ratio’d to hell.
They’re basically trying to solve a problem that gaming has had for 20 years.
Low quality clones asset flips in cash grabs have always been a problem. It’s always been a problem on steam.
The issue is AI just makes it easier to do in faster to do so there’s more of them. It’s not a new problem though.
They have been trying to solve this problem for a decade. This isn’t a problem that’s likely actually solvable.
Cuz no matter what you do, you’re going to hurt legitimate devs far more than the cash. Grab guys the slop cloners.
You’re also going to knock out the slowly growing group of people who are using AI to make their little dream games but actually do it well.
There’s not a lot of them but they’re popping up on places like itch or just on GitHub pages.
I don’t envy valve the fact they’re even attempting to tackle while expected because it is their store is also genuinely commendable. Most companies would look at this go f*** that it ain’t worth the effort and then f*** off.
It’s not possible for Valve to solve with the way Valve usually approaches problems. There’s no easy way around it: you gotta scale up and do manual, human review. Algorithms and automation can’t make these judgement calls. It’s gotta be manual, it’s got to be flexible enough to get around trolling and false positives. It won’t be perfect, but no one is asking for perfection. Just a proper store and (if caught as a false positive) a reasonable response time.
They have two options: fix it fast or die.
A store overrun by slop will quickly lose its customers, and with them any developers offering actual games.
Once the ball starts rolling it’ll become a vicious circle, and once enough developers and customers have left there’ll be no coming back. And it certainly looks like the ball is picking up speed.
You’re right to wait and see, but, at the same time, you amswered for a lot of people here when you said it’s ramping up.
Sony’s catalogue and PS5Z was literally just a week ago or slightly more than that. Numerous similar cases are breaking out, and, I hate to say it, but other bad actors are also taking this chance as a free for all to target more vulnerable indies.
Valve isn’t acting yet presumably because they want to see where this is all heading and then align accordinly. Is there going to be new govie policy? A new breakthrough in AI development? New standardisation on Github? No one knows.
Short of Gaben uploading his own custom made AI into Steam, it really is best to pray things turn out well.
I recently looked up Family Time because of the hype (and the Papa! melted my brovaries), but of course there’s a clone with a fox lady already. That made me mad.
At leas two of them, apparently, one with even the same exact name 🤮 (how is that allowed?).
Game’s not my cup of tea, but I tagged both clones as slop (can’t report them because none of the reasons would apply, as this kind of cloning is still legal), not that it’ll do any good.
Least Vave could do is add “blatant slop clone” to the reasons to report a game.
Add a “AI Slop” feature in the reviews to track that. Let publishers flag games built on their IP. Give the store front some feature options for both.
The flag one should probably have a verification system and trust system to prevent IP trolling though. Reviews should probably also have rep system to weight reviews to tbh
They can tell them to let us gatekeep. Ai needs to be labeled.
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.
What about experienced developers who use AI, do they still count as a yahoo who cannot actually read their own code?
I think it’s a difficult situation because a programmer that has been making software before AI was even a thing is not the same as a vibecoder that doesn’t know what a variable is.
Depends. If they continue to use it on a regular basis, I give them a couple months before their ability starts to decline and theb apply yahoo to them. Otherwise if it’s more of a one off thing, I still personally do not trust the code but wouldn’t call them a yahoo yet.
Is the programmer reviewing the code ai shits out or blindly trusting it?
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.
If we are talking autocomplete for IDEs, not generative AI. Also, a lot of the predictive code lines thing are just based off of what’s most likely to come next, as ( most likely ) trained off of others work. Whereas I’d argue that is different enough from an LLM since it’s basically the IDE version of the autocomplete on your smart phones keyboard app ( if you keep it on ). For LLMs, I would argue that they generate generic code that majority of the time needs cleaned up in order to even function since it will often, especially from back before I ditched it, look at your request saying you are using a specific language version and disregard because it thinks it can just use any code from that language and it’ll work. Don’t even get me started on how generative AI companies purposefully make their “software” write code in a way that is extremely bloated snd could easily be cut down to a couple lines just so they can say how their AI ( emphasis on artificial ) can write more code faster.
If we’re talking filters on art programs like Krita, also historically not completely generative AI. Majority of them ( at least on Krita ) rely on transforming your art by whatever the code says it should do as compared to generating a new image/texture. No prompt nor a need to mass steal art online in order for these filters to work. As for even something like an autofill colourize mask thing, that relies more on some form of gap detection, which isn’t considered generative AI, AFAIK. Just an advanced bucket fill tool.
If we’re talking things like ESRGAN, sure, and I absolutely have problems with that as well, but they’re ever so slightly lesser versions of the problems I have with LLMs and such.
I am well aware that some forms of it have existed for long before LLMs, but they were much more tame and weren’t being used to destroy the internet and planet to the degree it’s being used now.
If we are talking autocomplete for IDEs, not generative AI
They’ve been using small-ish LLMs for that for a few years for now actually, started with github copilot in 2021, but then other plugins became available and Jetbrains started including their own.
I don’t mean intellisense that we had 10 or 20 years ago already where it suggests based on namespace visibility or whatever, I specifically mean where it suggests based on the context of your entire method or even file, not just the single statement
I was wrong though, apparently older content-aware fill is not generative AI, merely transformative. So I guess for example Photoshop has only had AI (generative fill, generative expand) for 3 years. Still, it’s getting likelier and likelier that people working on different projects in different domains use AI features without even realizing it’s AI.
If we’re talking things like ESRGAN, sure, and I absolutely have problems with that as well, but they’re ever so slightly lesser versions of the problems I have with LLMs and such.
Yes, stuff like that is mostly what I was referring to. Anything ML, neural network and so on. Not promptable, but still trained on a bunch of data that most likely is other people’s art.
